


This Multiplicity

by oneinspats



Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016), Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe, Krennic just wants Wine And A Bath Thank You, M/M, all your bases are belong to us, post-episode iv, rebels being a nuisance, the Emperor is as cryptic as ever, what is family??
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-02-07
Updated: 2019-01-07
Packaged: 2019-03-15 04:58:50
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 9
Words: 28,451
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13606041
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/oneinspats/pseuds/oneinspats
Summary: Tarkin and Krennic are sent on a mission to redeem themselves in the eyes of the emperor after the loss of the Death Star. Things, naturally, do not go according to plan.Sequel to Propagating Structure.Canon, what canon? Only ion-cannons.





	1. Chapter 1

 

_In life, the number of beginnings is exactly equal to the number of endings: no one has yet to begin life who will not end it. … in the beginning there was the Act. That nothing can precede action - no breath before act, no thought before act, no pervasive love before some kind of act._

_Madness, Rack, and Honey_

 

/

 

Krennic is falling. He knows that moving one part of your body will cause you to flip because trajectory is overly affected by minutia when in free fall.

He twists, slightly, and yes, flips, so he is falling face first towards the planet’s incredibly firm looking surface.

Terribly rocky. Red rock, like the desert of Lexrul.

Where the fuck is he? Not Krennic, he knows (approximately) where he is, but where the fuck is Tarkin?

Ah, there he is. The fighter is below him and positioned where, as he passes, he is able to grab the side of the open back pod and feels his lower half swing forward and smack against the underside.  

‘Fucking fuck,’ he snarls.

Everything hurts instantly. He is too old for these hijinks.

Tarkin twists around with an annoyed face, ‘get in. We have to go.’

‘You didn’t just free fall then whack half your body into a fighter jet.’

‘Get in, Lieutenant-commander.’

Krennic hauls himself up and forward so he plants head first into the pod then rearranges himself as Tarkin speeds them away from the rebel base.

‘Timer set?’ Tarkin asks.

‘We have three minutes.’

Tarkin drives fast and they’re whipping by rock overhangs, down into a gorge. Everything is a red blur.

The explosion comes with relief and Krennic twists around to see a plum of black smoke in the sky as the rebel base crumples in on itself.

‘I think that was one of the better ones we did,’ Krennic says as he adjusts himself and finally straps in.

‘I disagree with your rating system.’ Tarkin replies, voice tinny over the receiver.

‘Artistry is half of arson.’

Team missions are fraught at the best of times. Too few people in close confines making difficult decisions. Oh yes, strict military hierarchy aides in maintaining order but they are lacking this at the moment.

Which, Tarkin thinks, is Krennic’s fault. The man’s continuing lack of respect for the correct hierarchy grates. No, Krennic must traverse up and down the proper chain of command as if it does not exist.

 

There is no structure.

  
  
  
  
  
When Tarkin had reported the loss of the Death Star to the Emperor he had expected fury. Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Instead, he had been greeted with distracted frustration instead of catastrophic anger. Anger Tarkin had expected and knew both he and Krennic deserved. Traditionally, failure had not been in his vocabulary and he is loath to make it appear more than this one time. The Death Star’s destruction is rank. It fouls up Tarkin’s plans, makes a stench.

The Emperor to Tarkin, ‘Wilkin? Carusso?’

‘Dead and defected, my lord.’

‘This was not according to my plan, Wilhuff.’

This is when Tarkin had expected something more. The Emperor had looked at him for a long time, or _through_ him for a long time.

‘How long have we known each other?’ The Emperor had asked.

‘Many years.’

‘And in all that time you’ve never let me down. I trust it will not happen again. The Death Star was always a mad dream. Extremists,’ the Emperor sighed. ‘That is the concern now. And always has been. Rebel extremists, political, religious, social. Everyone must be brought to the centre, the core of the Empire, for the sake of stability.’

‘I agree, sir. Rebellion of any kind is an anathema to security and stability of the Empire.’

‘Just so,’ the Emperor had replied. ‘And the threat to the Empire continues. I will not tolerate it.’ The Emperor considered something for a time before motioning Tarkin closer. ‘You and that architect-engineer must make amends for the loss of the Death Star.’

Tarkin, stiffly, ‘yes, sir.’

‘I have a mission for you both. What do you know of polygons?’

At the time it had annoyed him that it was due to Krennic he was able to answer the Emperor’s question with some satisfaction. Now, months later, it’s become an unrelenting fact that Krennic’s mad natterings sometimes have their uses.

At the end of the discussion detailing the mission, coupled with the traditional insertion of Jedi premonitions, the Emperor had said, ‘I am entrusting this task to you, Wilhuff, because I know you will get results.’

Tarkin had recognized the situation for what it was: punishment coupled with a chance for honour.

‘It’s a chance for us to rectify our mistakes,’ Tarkin had later said to Krennic.

‘Mistakes,’ Krennic had sneered. ‘Hardly our fault.’

Tarkin hadn’t argued the point. The Death Star was dust, Wilken was dead, Carusso escaped back to the rebels, and the ripple effects of the latest events were only just beginning to be felt. This was a time for firm, decisive action. Not arguments. Or wild goose-chases, Tarkin had thought.

But if the Emperor wanted to disappear them on a hunt across the galaxy that was his right. It was not Tarkin’s place to wonder why, but to do and die.

  
  


So here they are, in a desert on a mostly abandoned planet, blowing up an unimportant rebel base. Well, Tarkin thinks, it does take all the running you can do to stay in the same place. Even then, you sometimes slide backwards.

Tarkin pulls them into a small cave they had commandeered as headquarters for this leg of their mission.

‘It makes no sense, you know,’ Krennic says as he lowers himself onto his mat. ‘This wasn’t an important base.’

Tarkin opens their food pack and pulls out two capsules, he tosses one to Krennic.

‘Just storage for outdated fighters and fuel cells. They had some of those old hydrogen ones from back in the day. I hadn’t seen those since I was a kid,’ Krennic continues. ‘Any chance you have a pain killer that isn’t nullicaine?’

‘No.’

‘Do I want to vomit?’

‘I can’t answer that for you.’

Krennic considers himself and decides that he can muscle through the pain for the time being. His hips and chest are bruised and his arms hurt from the wrenching they took when he grabbed hold of the fighter but, that wild part of him that always got him into trouble as a youth, maintains that it was worth everything. Jumping out of a building that is about to explode onto a fighter is something he’s always wanted to do.

Picking up the food capsule he opens it to find a dehydrated food package. From Tarkin’s side of the cave there is the sound of water being boiled and Krennic thinks he should probably sit up and make food.

‘Not terrible,’ Tarkin says as Krennic slowly moves over to the boiling water. ‘Last night’s was worse.’

‘What joy.’

He adds water to the package and pokes with a spoon until it looks rehydrated and heated. For a soupy, green concoction it is, indeed, better than expected. This is mostly to do with the spices, Krennic reasons. Make something spicy enough and it will taste half-decent by default.

  
  
  
  
The quasi-hollow feeling has not left in the intervening months since the Death Star’s destruction at the hands of the mole Carusso and stiff-necked rebels. Oh yes, there were salvageable parts but most was dust and the point remains that twenty years of hard work had gone in a matter of weeks. Hours. Minutes.

(He still dreams of the white clouds, milk-blue sky, the moon turning towards him. He dreams of the colour of salt, the smell of green, the blue-blue-blue of Scarif. He had thought such dreams done. It’s been months! Surely enough time has passed.)

Krennic can’t allow himself to think about the destruction of the Death Star because he cannot afford to think about it. Because it gets him no where to dwell on it. Tightens his chest, knots his stomach, turns lungs inside out. None of these things are useful.

He is not accustomed to feeling guilt. It’s not an emotion he likes. Still, he trusts that he will not be overwhelmed by it.

  


Tarkin pulls up a map of the next location. A planet nearby, southern hemisphere, marshy land. Swamp-like and foul smelling. Krennic watches with morose expression.

‘Why won’t you explain the Emperor’s reasoning?’ Krennic asks.

‘We have been given this mission to attempt to resuscitate something akin to trust with the Emperor. There’s nothing else to explain.’

‘I don’t believe you.’

‘That’s your prerogative.’

Krennic points at him with his spoon, ‘we’ve been through this, Governor,, Grand Moff, Admiral - whatever title it is that you’re wearing at the moment. Work is done better when information is shared.’

Tarkin shrugs. Krennic makes a face and eats his re-hydrated meal with frustrated looks.

‘We’re going to Rettna next,’ Tarkin continues, ignoring Krennic’s rude expression. ‘Similar MO as here. Scout the base for several days, relay what information we gather, then detonate.’

‘ _Why_?’

Tarkin closes the map and tucks his tablet away with prim and measured movements. This is wild space between rims and sectors. It is not a place for paltry arguments or questioning command. Krennic, a primarily urban creature, does not appreciate this as much as Tarkin would wish.

‘Because that is the Emperor’s orders.’

‘Why?’

‘Because he has deemed Rettna a threat. As I have said before.’

Krennic finishes his food and tidies it away without comment. Tarkin watches him, the stiff movements and stolen glances over.

‘If I knew-’ Krennic starts.

‘I’ve told you everything, Lieutenant-commander.’

In response, Krennic drags his mat over to Tarkin’s and says that if the man is going to be difficult and not discuss all aspects of the mission with him then be it on Tarkin’s head. The least he can do, however, is budge up. Dessert nights are cold and Krennic has no desire to sequester himself inside the carcass of an animal to stay warm.

‘You’re really fixated on that,’ Tarkin mutters. Krennic buries himself beneath his blanket and says, muffled, that it’s a striking image.

Tarkin thinks he needs to never mention anything from his past ever again. How did that even come up? Oh yes, Krennic worms his way in and the next thing happening is you spilling out entrails of childhood stories.

‘How is your abdomen?’

‘Pained.’ Krennic shifts closer. ‘I want a bath and a bottle of wine.’

‘I told you to wait for me.’

Krennic, still beneath the blanket, says something that Tarkin cannot make out but he doesn’t press because the silence of night is settling in and there is a primal need to respect it.

In space there is no night. Something about leaving planetside removes part of humanity from itself. The fear and respect of the dark, the need for sun. Maybe this is why cults begin planetside rather than in space stations -- they remain in touch with mysticism. Space stations are regimented with dietary supplements, pills, sun lamps, and mandatory exercise. There is no room for the Othering of belief.

Beside him, Krennic’s breathing evens out. Tarkin watches the stars and thinks about navigation on Eriadu. One of the early lessons with his uncle had been charting his way out of wilderness without aid. His uncle had explained that if the universe were full of stars, so full they made the sky a sheet of diamonds, they wouldn’t be able to find their way. Space between distant, gaseous bodies is what allows them to know where they are, where they came from, where they are going.

Tarkin thinks he should mention it to Krennic. Maybe in the morning, if he remembers. Pulling out his tablet he sits with back leaned against rock wall and spends the time until he sleeps sending updates to the Emperor.

  


Tarkin wakes to Krennic muttering a curse as he tries to sit up.

‘Nullicaine is in the emergency pack,’ Tarkin says, eyes still closed.

‘You know that shit makes me nauseous. I’ll be fine once I start moving.’

Tarkin hums as he feels Krennic force himself up into a standing position with soft complaints about sleeping outside and how cold nights get.

‘Next planet’s a swamp?’

Tarkin murmurs an affirmative.

‘Perpetual heat and humidity?’

A nod.

‘Excellent. Just like home.’

Tarkin opens his eyes to see Krennic standing and looking down at him with an expression Tarkin does not wish to read into. It is too soft. These months in close confinement are doing poor things for them. In past dalliances Tarkin had always relied upon the certainty of distance to maintain a proper protocol and lack of long-term attachment.

Four months of constant contact beginning with the ill-thought-out affair on the Death Star is not what Tarkin had in mind. One month on the Death Star, one month on Coruscant, two in the wild. It will become heavy, that weight of time spent together.

‘What?’ Krennic asks. While still looking at Tarkin his face has settled back into its usual calm arrogance.

‘Nothing.’

 _Intimacy,_ Tarkin thinks with annoyance. Particularly, intimacy with Krennic.

Long, small-teamed missions are built on intimacy. You sleep together, piss together, eat together, flee together, kill together, survive together.

There are benefits to the Emperor’s decision for it to be the both of them on this mission: Krennic is reliable in tight situations, intelligent, a good shot, willing to take risks, and has a useful amount of cultural and linguistic knowledge of this particular region of the galaxy. It makes _sense_ to have the team be the two of them for this particular exercise, the use of it as a means to repay the loss of the Death Star aside.

But alas, drawbacks include memorizing Krennic’s weird ticks and knowing how he sleeps.

  


‘Have I told you about the unfortunately named Stump Stabber? It’s on Eriadu.’

They are racing over tar sands in the fighter jet, keeping low in case of detection though Tarkin thinks them most likely alone. Petroleum oozes up from wounds in the earth’s surface. It smells foul and is wretchedly hot. Sun glints off white sand in the distance. There is a raw beauty Tarkin appreciates and he wishes he were able to explore the land more thoroughly.

Krennic, in one of his usual morning moods, had extrapolated at length about Moonshine Birds on Lexrul who leave an egg in another bird’s nest. When the hatchling is born it pushes its roost mates out in order to get all the nutrients brought to the nest by the parent birds.

‘Never heard of it,’ Krennis says. ‘Is it parasitic?’

‘Indeed. Lays its eggs in the body of another insect, usually the large Net Spiders, and when the eggs hatch inside the larva it eat alive.’

‘Disgusting.’

Tarkin recognizes Krennic’s glee over the receiver.

Tarkin continues, ‘it’s a wasp, proper name _Kregarhyssium_. They’re approximately 51 millimeters long, dark red and yellow, and with an egg depositor half the length of their body.’

‘Predatory?’

‘Oh yes.’

 _Kregarhyssi_ lay their eggs as happily in dead flesh as well as living. There is no requirement for the host to be breathing, it is only that injection of eggs into a live host is the most common form of nesting. _Kregarhyssi_ like the eyes of dead animals. Also tongues, exposed entrails.

‘They sound vile.’

Tarkin smirks. He can hear Krennic’s smile. He searches for other Eriadian parasitic creatures to discuss. Ones, he thinks, that aren’t human. Krennic had already made _that_ joke twice, but about Lexrul, and had laughed at it both times.

Krennic’s laugh is quiet. It is air being pushed out in a sort of slightly wheezing ‘ha’ noise. Then he says ‘funny’ which leads Tarkin to believe that in the past people have been confused about the emotion being expressed.

  


After several hours they break to eat and check the location of the nearest refueling station near the Chemical Valley, as Krennic has dubbed the land they are flying over.

The planet Doaba is unfriendly. Caustic, petroleum ridden with chemical filled air. Eyes sting, the back of throats ache. The smell is of burning rubber, almost sulphurous. The land continues red, white, sharp orange where it is not black.

Krennic settles next to Tarkin in the limited shade provided by the fighter’s wings. Both are sweating and dirty.

‘Reminds me a bit of home,’ Krennic says as he opens his water canister. He motions to the broken land. ‘Outside Sativran is like this.’

‘I thought swamps and humidity reminded you of home.’

‘They do. But so does this. There are fields where the oil gushes up and rains down on you. Every farm has its own well and no need to tap into any sort of planetary energy grid.’

‘That explains the lack of taxes coming in from Lexrul on that front.’

‘That and we probably wouldn’t pay them anyway. Bit of a no-man’s land. Everyone has grandpa’s blaster and a strong affinity for their Family Plot.’

‘I continue to marvel at Lexrul’s provincialism.’

‘We all try and get off somehow.’

Tarkin thinks that _this_ explains much about Krennic. He has had this moment before where he lands on a thing and thinks ‘ah, this will explain everything about Orson Krennic.’ To date, it hasn’t worked, but he finds himself continuing to try. It’s a sort of madness.

‘I have a cousin who’s an oil sniffer,’ Krennic continues. ‘Wanders around people’s properties sniffing out oil for them. Sometimes he uses a rod made from tree branches to guide him.’

‘There are more reliable and modern ways to find oil than that.’

‘Sure, but he’s cheaper. When I was ten my uncle took me to help him set up a homemade blast made of nitroglycerin to open an oil chasm near the surface of his land. Instead, we ended up starting an uncontainable oil fire that burned for weeks.’

‘And this was when you weren’t shooting Lexrul crickets with pellet blasters?’

‘Correct.’

Tarkin nods. Krennic grins at him.

‘You’re so serious,’ Krennic says. ‘It was good wholesome fun compared to what you got up to at twelve. Anyway, I managed what no one else in my family managed.’

‘What’s that?’

‘I escaped.’

  


The abysmal feeling of apocalyptic emptiness of the land ends when they leave the oil slicked dessert for salt flats. Finality has a different meaning with regards to salt flats. Weathered, bleached bones of animals stick out of the ground. The sky shimmers and is mirrored in the land below.

Tarkin understands the principles of body-mapping. Map your land onto your body, your body onto your land. He had done it unconsciously as a child. Eriadu breeds the need to map into its people, it breeds it out of them as well.

He had been both lost and centered in the Carrion Spike. Mapped himself into the land in order to survive, the land wished to map him out of it in order to survive. Like on Lexrul, Eriadian people wrench up, set fire to, and control the natural world. Tarkin thinks the most natural thing in humanity is the desire for control.

Wilderness, the hinterlands of the world, in order to survive, therefore naturally wish to consume people. Krennic had once said that most things on Lexrul want to kill you. Tarkin thinks this sums up nature well. Red in tooth and claw etc. etc. He doesn't want a pangeanic for it. Keep to unsentimental fact. Metaphors, he thinks, are poets with rotted flesh. Don’t be afraid to convey things as they are, it moulders minds when you hide truths in metaphor.

Salt flats are like water to their eyes. Refreshing. Oh yes, just as barren as the chemical ridden gorges from before but instills a different kind of awe.

Small pools of water reflect their vessel back at them. They fly along without rippling. Without disturbing. The only thing left behind a feint chemtrail.

 

/


	2. Chapter 2

Rettna, a different beast than Doaba, is water with some land. A blue planet, no rather, a brownish-green planet. The water being brackish. There are long rooted trees surging up from mud and silt. Sharp frawns, large leaves two hands across and five hands long light green and white veined, other leaves small and hairy, thick vines, tree trunks with jagged bark. The air is close. Krennic thinks it entirely too warm but appreciates that, at the very least, he won’t freeze at night. 

As they are on a mission in increasingly hot environs, neither is dressed to code. They opt for light undershirts and workmen’s trousers and boots instead of the more aesthetic, but not as practical, imperial officer’s uniforms. Krennic adjusts his blaster holster and shifts his pack as he drops from the fighter to the one bit of dry land they found. 

‘I suspect this base might be more active than the last one,’ Tarkin says pulling out his tablet. A map projects between them. ‘So we should hike in for surveillance purposes then decide the best course of action.’ 

‘I thought that the rebels haven’t been active in this quadrant for at least two years.’ 

‘It’s on our list.’ 

Krennic rolls his eyes, adjusts his pack again, and follows after Tarkin into the forest. 

  
  


Despite enjoying the prospect of not shivering at night, Krennic dislikes the close atmosphere of Rettna’s forest. It is one where you cannot see what is beside you. Three feet away could be a predator, another person. The swamp he grew up near allowed space to breath. There was room to exist. Here, he feels like he is being watched. Like there’s something else with them.  

Plants, he wrinkles his nose. Unruly, maddening things. 

Thick tangles of moss hang down and within it are small, red bugs that smear orange when crushed. They do not bite and so Krennic assumes them to not be dangerous. The air thick with humidity also hums with flies, midges, and small stinging insects. Their high pitched buzz is enough to drive a person to distraction. He swats at them but they do not flee. How Tarkin is immune to such nuisances mystifies Krennic as much as it annoys him. 

Somewhere, a distant growl. Krennic and Tarkin jerk their heads towards the sound. Both rest hands on blasters, tense, peer into shadowed shrubbery. Thick ferns, layers of trees, tangled branches gives nothing away. It is impossible to tell the distance of the sound and so they move on. 

Such work requires silence which means more time for introspection. For Krennic this lands on, inevitably, his current situation. Not ideal, he thinks. Not ideal  _ at all _ . 

Although, he reasons, I don’t know what the alternative is, if there even is one. 

 

 

It had been a rough landing in Coruscant. Days of silence. Of showing up at Tarkin’s residence demanding to know what news only to be told there wasn’t any, because the Emperor was busy. 

Sometimes they’d fuck on whatever surface was nearby because it seemed the thing to do. Sometimes they’d go out into the twilight, when the sun was a patient etherized upon a table, and Krennic would smoke and buy cheap street food while Tarkin made disparaging remarks. They’d drink dodgy rum and end up naked in one or another’s bed. In the morning, with cotton mouths, they’d silently make caf then drift apart for required distance to maintain a pretence of them having people to see other than each other. Who would speak to them? Alienated until the Emperor decided their fate it was telling upon who you could and couldn’t rely. 

Krennic hadn’t blamed any of his former acquaintances and friends. He’d have done the exact same thing. He  _ had  _ done the exact same thing. 

Then, Tarkin reverses the situation three weeks in. He arrives at half six on the morning and says, ‘we’ve been given a second chance. Count yourself  _ decidedly _ lucky.’ 

Cautious optimism. A month longer in Coruscant as they prepare for the mission. Then off. A whirlwind. He hasn’t had much time to collect thoughts and isn’t sure he really wants to. 

The dalliance, relationship,  _ thing _ , stasis, between them continues on much as it has this past while, although something within it is changing. Krennic cleaves to the past. The normalcy, such as it was, they had on the Death Star, even on Coruscant. There were something like rules, something like a framework within which they operated. 

Now? Now, sometimes during the day, when they have a quiet moment, they’ll come together. Sometimes it’s at night between sleeps when they’re both half awake. Sometimes it’s in the morning against the fighter. Krennic knows Tarkin’s expressions, his movements and it makes him uncomfortable. Tarkin, though, is not a comfortable man. They share a jackal face. 

Absolute isolation makes men go mad. 

On Lexrul there are those aesthetics of the desert, the Fiorites who, driven insane by the silence of the land, believe there to be a higher power directing the universe. 

Krennic assumes there to be similar sects on every planet with abounding wilderness. That’s the problem with it, he thinks, too much wild and men go crazy. Become one with the dicky-birds. Lose the plot. 

He will not allow that to happen to him. 

Tarkin? Well, the man hid himself in the carcass of an animal when he was sixteen or whatever. Krennic thinks Tarkin is already a bit with the dicky-birds in the way some officers are. 

That brings back an old memory. Him, Galen and another friend smoking on a balcony in war decimated Coruscant. Their friend had said, ‘there are two kinds of generals. Murdering generals and honourable generals. Murdering generals will just send you in to get killed and they know it and you know it and the shrapnel about to kill you knows it. Honourable generals are worse because they’re going to do the same thing to you, but they’ll make you want it first.’  

Having lived a great deal more since those heady days of civil war and the dissolution of a Republic in favour of an Empire Krennic thinks that the sentiment bleeds into triteness. But there is  _ some  _ truth to it and if he had to use it as a form of categorization he’d give Tarkin the decency of being just a murdering general. Tarkin won’t make you think you’re doing something glorious when you’re just being used as ion-canon fodder. 

  
  
  


The Rettna base is the fourth base they’ve scouted since beginning the mission. The first three were isolated, mostly abandoned situations. As they approach the vicinity of this base he finds his previous suspicions confirmed. There are clear signs of it being more active than the last three. Tarkin motions Krennic to him as he pulls out a hard copy map of the base in order to avoid detection of their tablets.  

‘All right,’ he whispers. ‘I believe we’re here by the south entrance. This base was once used as a refueling station for extra-galactic exploration during the early days of the Republic. Since then it’s fallen into disrepair and was eventually commandeered by the rebels. The Emperor, as with the previous bases, wants us to scout then detonate.’ 

‘It’s a pre-Egdalian base design.’ 

‘Which means?’ 

‘Hard to blow up without going into the centre of it. We’re going to have to focus on the base foundations here,’ Krennic points to two regions. ‘And here. It’ll take a lot of fuel.’ 

‘Just rig up that nitrogen blast you made with your uncle.’ 

Krennic raises eyebrows, was that a joke? Oh, it was. The Grand Moff jests! He smiles. Tarkin glares. This, Tarkin thinks, is one of the many problems with Krennic. He has this absurd desire to be something like friendly with one another. And it’s _ contagious.  _ Being friendly complicates things. It makes things warm and they are already too much complicated. Tarkin wonders, briefly, madly, if he shouldn’t take Krennic out at some point and blame it on the rebels. The man, after all, has a nasty habit of altering the space, air, weight of the galaxy around him. 

‘Focus, Lieutenant-commander.’ 

‘Getting to those areas will be hard. These sorts of bases were built as strong holds meant to withstand sieges. It’s a one-way street once you’re inside.’ 

‘Hopefully we’ll be able to avoid detection and meet as little resistance as we did for the previous three.’ 

Krennic nods but Tarkin can tell he is as skeptical about this possibility as Tarkin is himself. 

‘We’ll scout first,’ Tarkin says. ‘Then decide the best course of action. It should take us three, four days at the most, to be thorough.’ 

‘Has the Emperor-’

‘No. He hasn’t said anything.’ 

The map is folded and placed into Tarkin’s pack as they both take out scopes and creep closer to the base. 

  
  


Tarkin had expected some activity, he had seen signs of it before they landed and he knows Krennic had as well, but the level of it before them is unexpected. 

The base is alive with people and droids. Fewer fighter jets than expected, mostly freight and passenger vessels. Tarkin snaps stills to send back to the Emperor. What truly stands out to him is that the rebels appear to be in a sort of uniform which is unusual. Most factions are a hodge-podge of various movements. They come together then dissipate as needed. Their nebulous nature is one of the rebellion’s strengths. 

Although the imperial military speaks of the rebellion as if it one cohesive force, Tarkin knows that it is far from unified. For every formal militaristic cell, like those organized by Mon Mothma and the Organas, there are fleeting anarchistic cells that form to destroy one or another point of the Empire then disappear once their mission is complete. 

This has the ring of something more formal. Not in a military sense. Mon Mothma and Princess Leia’s faction are well trained, militarily adept and as capable as any imperial troop. No, this speaks to a cohesion around leadership, a structured society, but not in a military manner as he had expected. 

Worrisome. And strange, that he has heard nothing about it until now. He suspects not even the Emperor is fully aware. 

Or, perhaps he is. One can never tell with the Emperor. 

‘Should we canvas all the way around?’ Krennic asks in a whisper. 

‘Yes, we’ll go widershines.’ 

They quietly pick their way through foliage, snapping stills as necessary. The strain of surveillance is different in this climate compared to Doaba. The stifling heat means they’re sweating while standing still, in the shade. It’s the sort of humidity where you dry off after a shower then have to dry off a second time. Breathing is a form of labour. 

‘They’re well organized,’ Krennic whispers as they skirt around the back of the base. ‘Uniforms and everything. Traditional single line hierarchy it seems. The yellow stripes on the shoulder indicate rank, I bet.’ 

‘It certainly looks that way.’ 

‘No guards though.’ 

Tarkin has noticed this as well and thinks it odd. Granted, they may have surveillance technology that scans the sky and ground rendering physical watchmen moot. But, despite their organization, they do not appear to be too technologically advanced. Their blasters are dated, their flying vessels old, early-Empire models, their clothing though uniform in appearance, is made of simple linens and not complex in design. Red tunics, beige trousers, yellow stripes for rank. No tooled leather, artificial materials, or specialized accessories. 

  
  


With their initial survey complete they retreat back towards the fighter, taking a different route from their initial one in to the base. 

The fighter needs to be better hidden so their first work is to make it, as much as possible, less noticeable. The ample vegetation of Rettna proves useful. 

‘That is one big spider,’ Krennic says as he shifts a frawn aside. 

Tarkin looks over at it, ‘It has more than eight legs.’ 

‘It’s fucking ugly.’ 

The creature raises its two front legs in defense and bares its fangs. 

‘I wonder if it’s poisonous,’ Krennic muses. 

‘Put your hand close enough and you’ll find out.’ 

‘Big ones on Lexrul usually aren’t. It’s the small ones that hide in your boots you have to worry about. Kill a man in seconds.’ 

Tarkin, returning to the activity of hiding the fighter, says that on Eriadu there are bird spiders and harry backs which look like this one. Eight legs though, not ten. 

‘Anyway,’ Krennic rejoins him, having shaken off the critter back into the woods. ‘I think the Empire needs to have more prep on the flora and fauna of our planets. I hate nature but I’d like to know what’s going to kill me and what isn’t if I’m to be stuck in it.’ 

‘I’m sure it’d be an edifying experience.’ 

‘Not everyone grew up like a savage on some desiccated plateau.’ 

Tarkin raises an eyebrow. He refrains from pointing out that, from what he knows from Krennic’s file, his upbringing was hardly core-world civilized. Some people develop such chips on their shoulders about origins. Tarkin’s never understood the point of it. And Krennic grew up around wilderness such as this. He thinks, This is probably why the man hates it, reminds him of where he’s from. 

‘I think that will suffice,’ Tarkin says stepping back from the fighter. ‘Due to their lack of guards I suspect they may have surveillance equipment that picks up transmission signals so we will hold off sending information to the Emperor. We will keep as low-tech as possible for the time being, until we can ascertain their level of sophistication.’ 

‘Shouldn’t we get some back up? There’s a lot more of them than what we’ve encountered thus far.’

‘We can manage it.’ 

‘I have no doubts about your strategic abilities but in terms of practicality we’re only two people.’ 

Tarkin accepts this is true, but decides that the element of surprise is on their side and he has seen worse odds in his lifetime. Krennic mutters that he think Tarkin’s just hell bent on death-by-glorious-battle since he was denied it on the Death Star. 

‘Which,’ Krennic continues, ‘would not have been glorious. It would have stupid.’ 

‘I thought you, of all people, would have wanted to die on your beloved creation.’ 

‘Not by imploding against a gas giant.’ 

‘A death is a death, you won’t care much when it’s over.’ 

‘Bullocks, and you know it.’ 

Tarkin shrugs. Pulls out his scope and notebook and begins jotting down his initial impressions to formulate a report to the Emperor. He motions for Krennic to hand over his as well. 

‘You know that the _ manner _ of dying is important,’ Krennic says as he tosses the scope to Tarkin. ‘Sure, you’ll be dead but legacies remain.’ 

‘Death in battle is sufficient.’ 

Krennic settles on the ground and begins poking through their packs, pulling out the water heater and two food capsules. 

‘We should go back tonight,’ he says prodding the heater into action. ‘We might be able to get closer.’ 

‘I agree, we’ll move around midnight.’ 

With a grudging sound the heater comes to life and water added to bring to a boil. Krennic takes the food packs and dumps them in. Today’s nourishment is beige in appearance and the lack of taste is beginning to grate. He idly wonders if there is a chance he could convince Tarkin to stop off somewhere with actual establishments to eat something better for a night. He also wouldn’t mind a drink. And a real bed. And a fully equipped fresher. And something to make the dull throb of his bruised chest dissipate without making his nauseous. In fact, the drink would help with that. 

But he knows Tarkin well enough to push such thoughts of requests away. It does no good to linger on what he cannot have. 

  
  
  


With night comes rain. Tarkin and Krennic huddle beneath the wing of the fighter, having moved some of their foliage aside for access. For light they have a small solar lamp tinted to avoid detection. Although the density of the forest seems to be protection enough Tarkin cannot help his training. Keep everything low: limited light, limited scent, limited sound. 

‘Cards?’ Krennic offers once staring out into the inky darkness loses its appeal. ‘We have time for a few hands of something.’

‘Sure.’ 

‘Scrimmage?’  

No answer. Krennic deals and Tarkin goes first, stealing an immediate trick. Krennic’s turn and he steals one for himself. They continue until they’re out of cards and neither are inclined to deal again. 

‘Two hours before we head out,’ Tarkin says further dimming the light to save power. They have already checked and re-checked their rain kit and their blasters and their nighttime surveillance cams. 

Outside of the rain there is the sound of footsteps. Tarkin immediately turns off the light and both he and Krennic tense. It is almost impossible to discern shapes against the trees in the dark with rain and wind moving branches and leaves about. 

‘It was footsteps?’ Krennic asks, low near Tarkin’s ear. 

‘Yes.’ 

They watch the trees. No sign of humans, aliens or droids. Though Tarkin thinks the sound had been bipedal in speed and gate. But it’s gone, now. 

‘No more than three,’ he says. ‘Two, I think, most likely.’ 

Krennic taps Tarkin’s arm and motions to the other side of the wing and Tarkin can see a light deeper in the forest. It jostles and moves away from them in the direction of the base. 

‘One of the rebels?’ Krennic asks. 

‘Most likely.’ 

The light disappears in the woods and Tarkin feels Krennic relax a fraction. He wonders if perhaps the suggestion of backup isn’t the worst idea. But, he is loath to call for support so soon into the mission deciding that after this night’s surveillance and tomorrow’s he will be able to make a more informed decision.    
  
  
  


They are soaked through in minutes as they head through the forest back towards the base. Nocturnal predators are quickly added to the list of things Tarkin is thinking about as they move through underbrush. 

Miserable weather proves beneficial as the compound is deserted when they kreep close to the edge of the forest. Approaching, even in the dark with the rain, the decayed nature of the building becomes more apparent. There are plants cracking concrete, bending stone, erupting from bowed steel. It puts Tarkin in mind of a line he heard once - something about round the decay   
of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare something or other a lone traveler stands. It had been years ago and he had been standing alongside a dessicated inland sea. Dead fish, delicately scaled, boned, stared empty eyed at him. 

With night cams he documents the building. The arrangement of the ships outside of it. The angle of balustrades, location of doors, windows, places where weapons might be hidden. 

Krennic, Tarkin notices, is documenting the building both as a military man and as an architect. Some of the angles shots are taken in are not necessary for reconnaissance. He heats a whisper of his com, ‘we only have about ten of these left in the galaxy and it’s going to be nine once we’re done.’ 

‘Conservation effort?’ 

‘When I get old and retire to teach I’d like to be able to show students things that no longer exist. Where we came from architecturally.’ 

‘We should be quick.’ 

Krennic takes the hint and they move around the building in as efficient a manner as they can manage. 

Below the din of the rain Tarkin notices a second sound. A thrumming, not machine made but human. Organic. A deep hum. He catches Krennic’s arm and gestures to the buildinging. Krennic blinks and as he notices the sound too his eyebrows lift up. 

‘What is that?’ he whispers over the com. 

‘No idea.’ 

Krennic pulls out a recorder and turns it on saying that while they’ll most likely not catch anything beside rain it’s worth a try. The humming continues for another two minutes before stopping. Tarkin and Krennic wait, but hearing nothing further disappear themselves from the base. 

  
  
  


‘What the _fuck_ was that?’ Is the first thing either says as they decant beneath the wing of the fight. It’s Krennic’s question and answered with an eloquent shrug by Tarkin who is fiddling with their com’s device to relay to the Emperor what they saw. 

‘And I thought we were going to hold off in case they’re scanning,’ Krennic continues. 

‘That was before tonight’s foray.’ 

‘Probably a good idea. Again, what the fuck was that?’ 

‘Humming.’ 

‘I got that much.’ 

‘Check your recorder, I want to know if it picked up.’ 

Krennic sits down and pulls out the recorder to replay. His earpiece picks up the rain, very low, very subtle beneath the rain, is the hum. He hands it to Tarkin with a nod. 

‘Good,’ Tarkin sighs as he too seats himself. ‘We can forward it along with the visuals to the Emperor.’ 

‘It wasn’t a machine making that noise. And it didn’t sound like an animal.’ 

‘No.’ 

‘Sounded like people.’ 

‘It did.’ 

‘A lot of people.’ 

Tarkin nods, furiously tapping away at his pad as he organizes thoughts and impressions and a brief outline of recommendations. Krennic watches Tarkin work for a moment before pulling out his own tab and swiping it on. He isn’t satisfied with the building. It’s been modified, he thinks, and I want to know more about the style.  

His knowledge of pre-Egdalian design is limited as it hadn’t interested him much and he messages an old colleague to see if he can have some files transferred. If the man can dig anything up specifically on the Rettna base that would be useful. 

‘Have people not been responding to you?’ Krennic asks, putting the tablet away. ‘I keep messaging people and they don’t respond.’ 

Tarkin looks up, face blue-screen illuminated. ‘You don’t message people, Krennic, you inundate them.’ 

‘I do not.’ 

‘In one half hour period I received  over forty messages from you about fungi.’ 

‘I was explaining extremophiles to you. They’re quite fascinating.’ 

‘For a man who dislikes nature you know far too much about fungi.’ 

‘You’d be surprised - some fungi eat through iron. Did you know that? There are tracks in Sativran, when we used rail transit before hover technology was perfected, and fungi has devoured it. Rust was not its downfall. Fungi was.’ 

Tarkin raises an eyebrow. Krennic grins at him. It’s a shit eating expression. Tarkin knows better than to provoke when the Lieutenant-Commander is in such a mood as it will only result in Krennician rantings about something or other. 

Such as polygons and butterflies. 

Tarkin sighs, ‘we’re outcasts for the moment. People will message you once you’re back in the good graces of the Emperor.’ 

‘How does being an outcast affect your position as Grand Moff and Governor of the Outer Rim?’ 

‘My deputy is managing affairs while we are on this mission. That is not an unusual state of affairs.’ 

‘You didn’t, strictly speaking, answer my question.’ 

Tarkin waves the conversation away. Krennic rolls his eyes, lays out his sleeping kit and mutters that if the Grand Moff is in such a mood he can have first shift. This is a too occupied planet. They must keep watch at all times.

 

/


	3. Chapter 3

Morning is clear skies, steady continuation of unrelenting humidity, and Krennic waking up to Tarkin dumping his recon kit onto him. 

‘I need more sleep,’ Krennic complains, rolling over and burying his face into his jacket which is currently functioning as a pillow. 

‘Get up, we’re doing another round.’ 

‘Beauty sleep, you cruel man, I need it.’ 

‘Up.’ 

Krennic glares with beary eye. Tarkin is cruelly unsympathetic and ducks out from under the fighter wing to survey their surroundings. Despite the happenings of the previous night, the strange humming, the people they heard moving through the underbrush, there is no sign of anyone having passed through. 

A grudging few minutes later Krennic emerges into daylight. He attempts to flatten his hair but the humidity is too much so the curls are aggressive. In desperation he jams a hat on and takes up his surveillance pack. 

  
  


They pick their way through growth, taking yet another path to the base, and hope that their continues to hold out. Tarkin is amazed nothing has happened yet. Mostly because he and Krennic appear to be the sort of people to attract trouble. He supposes their might be something about synchronicity between certain people and climatic events. Perhaps that is granting too much credence to mere dumb chance. 

This new route takes them past old sculptures erupting from the ground, the water, between trees, out of trees. Granit heads submerged with unseeing eyes lurking above the surface. Moss has made its home on most of the strange statuary. Those long limbed and rooted trees suck to the rock for support. Wrap tight around it, reptilian action for a plant. 

The air continues still. Humidity continues unabated. They both are already sweating profusely after only twenty minutes of walking. 

If the work weren’t interesting this would be close to intolerable.

Coming up to the base they find it as it was on their first day of surveillance. There is activity, a pulse of energy that can only be exuded by flesh and blood creatures. It appears to both Krennic and Tarkin that there are more hover-transporters than before. 

Large, slow moving hover ships meant to carry cargo long ways. With cargo it’s not so much speed that matters as consistency of forward movement. The hoverships are lumbering and old. Tarkin puts them as models from forty years ago, perhaps fifty. 

Again, why such old technology? He mulls over this. The various factions of the rebellion he is most familiar with, while not possessing the newest tech, usually has at least somewhat up-to-date technology. Most of what they have comes from looting Imperial ships and bases so is no more than five years old. Ten at the most. 

Now, this isn’t to say the rebellion doesn’t have their creaking wreaks they employ when necessary - everyone has the heap of junk they haul out in last-ditch scenarios. But this scene in front of them is different. This group is different.    
  


Movement. More than before, a sudden change in how the rebels were working and they’re now clearing the freight hover-ships and other ships away. Taking some to the side of the partially overgrown parade ground surrounding the base, others are taken into a large hanger off to the back of the base. Then, they line up facing the base. 

Tarkin and Krennic take stills of the scene. The lineup makes Tarkin think of troop reviews but there is no evident commanding officer come to inspect. The rebels are silent. Eventually, a figure emerges from the base and stands before the gathering. A table is procured and placed in front of the figure. 

‘Is that...is this a ceremony of some kind?’ Krennic whispers. 

‘I believe so.’ 

‘Are they going to sacrifice someone?’ 

‘You do leap to the strangest conclusions.’ 

‘I escalate things quickly in my head.’ 

Tarkin sighs. It is the sigh of a man who knows this fact on a deep, personal level. 

The ceremony continues. The strange singing begins, akin to what they heard the previous night, and Krennic pulls out his recorder for a second round. This one will capture better without rain and without the sound coming from within the heavily fortified building. Tarkin mulls on the sight. 

Rebels performing a strange sort of ceremony. There is the ritualized singing, the leader holding up a bowl with smoke pouring over rim and down his hands. The singing, or slow chanting rather, dies down and the leader begins to speak. 

It is not a language Tarkin recognizes, which surprises him. If he does not know the language most often he can pinpoint language family, region and culture. Not this one. Krennic is still recording. Tarkin leans over and whispers in his ear, ‘we’re getting this processed immediately.’ 

‘Something, something, the sun we thank, something,’ Krennic pauses, squinting as he listens. ‘It’s incredibly archaic. Very flowery. Lot’s of registers I’ve never heard before.’ 

‘You know the language?’ 

‘Yeah, it’s an obscure dialect from Lexrul called Thalian. I thought it had died out. I have vague memories of Callen speaking it when I was a child. Oh something about land and … gassers?.’ 

‘Gassers?’ 

‘Rough translation but I think they mean gassers as in gas like petro. Not what we cook with but I only know the barest minimum.’ 

The leader finishes speaking and more chanting begins. Tarkin and Krennic remain until the ceremony is complete and as the group dissolves into its usual activities, of which Tarkin can find little rhyme and reason, he and Krennic decide to regroup back with the fighter. 

  
  
  


‘The Emperor mentioned his concerns with extremists,’ Tarkin says as he uploads the latest recording and sends it to be translated. ‘I wonder if he meant these ones.’ 

‘I fail to see how they’re extremists. I mean, are they even rebels? I haven’t seen any of the usual signs. No evident weapon caches, no clear military hierarchy, no signs of them coming or going from the planet. I also see no communications equipment on the outside of the base and with this kind of design you absolutely need a disk or something on the outside.’ 

‘They’re a cult of some kind.’ 

‘Is the Emperor worried about cults? I wouldn’t really put them on the high priority list.’ Krennic thinks about this for a moment then adds, ‘I wouldn’t really put them on any priority list. The Jedi were a cult.’ 

‘And what an issue they proved to be.’ 

‘But they were a cult with political power, though they pretended they were above that sort of thing. This group seems to be lost Lexrulians faffing about in a swamp. I would put the Jedi and this crew on two very different planes of concern.’    


Tarkin owes this to be true. He doesn’t see them as a threat yet, though he does not discount the possibility. If the Emperor was concerned enough to send them here then clearly they pose  _ some  _ threat to the Empire. Even if it a passing, small one. 

Checking his messages Tarkin finds nothing from the Emperor. He shuts the tablet off and shoves it away to worry about later. At the moment, they have to decide how best to move forward with the limited information they have and the orders they have been given. It is a difficult task. 

‘We need to do more recon,’ Tarkin says. Krennic opens his mouth to object but Tarkin cuts him off, ‘I suspect there is more here than meets the eye.’ 

‘I say we blow it up and move on. What’s next on our list after here? Somewhere with something like civilization? Is there a possibility of a fresher and a cantina to visit?’ 

‘What is your reasoning for acting so quickly, besides your desire to have a drink?’ 

‘Real food is more what I’m after. Look, we’ve never heard of these people before. We’ve not seen any blips on the radar regarding them and the rebellion. I don’t think they’re part of it, though I suspect you do-’ 

‘In rebellions people often have strange bedfellows.’ 

‘Be that as it may, I don’t think they’re particularly important. This is no Saul, no Leia or anyone else of that calabar. They’re not one of the five or six factions that pose a threat. That are posing  _ current, as we speak,  _ problems.’ 

Tarkin, though he is loath to admit it, appreciates when Krennic’s Lexrul accent slips in along the marginalia of his speech pattern. It occurs when he’s frustrated, tired, angry, or horny. Which means Tarkin hears quite a bit of it. Krennic tends to be at least one of those things, if not more than one, when Tarkin is around. 

Icily Tarkin says, ‘see, this is why you struggled with the position of director. You are too brash and liable to act without thinking.’ 

‘This from the man who blew up a planet just to watch it shatter?’ 

Tarkin allows the question to hang in delicate silence. They can hear the forest. Their own soft breathing. It does feel as if they are the only people in the galaxy at this, precise moment. 

Leaning forward, Tarkin presses his hand flat against Krennic’s chest, his thumb resting beneath collar bone, the rest of his hand cupping up Krennic’s neck. He pushes Krennic back so he’s lying down and climbs over him to straddles his hips. 

As he does so he points out that the order came from the Emperor, if one wishes to be detailed about this. And Tarkin  _ would  _ like to be detailed about this. He is leaning over Krennic, left hand supporting, right hand drifting from neck down chest and stomach. Krennic is breathing deeply and attempting to maintain some control of his body. Tarkin continues saying that if he remembers correctly, and he has a  _ terribly _ good memory, Krennic was ready to obliterate Jedha when it was not necessary. 

‘Difference,’ Krennic whispers. Tarkin’s hand pushes between them and rubs over the top of Krennic’s crotch. Krennic's breath hitches. 

‘Explain.’ 

‘Jedha was nothing.' He squirms, placing a hand on Tarkin's thigh he pushes up a fraction into Tarkin's palm. 'We’d already depleted it of its resources. It served no other purpose to the Empire. In fact, it was serving as a regular base for Rebel hideouts so eradication of the entire planet would have been useful to us. Alderaan, on the other hand, still had worth. And it’s not like the princess gave us anything useful so it was a pointless exercise.’

Tarkin removes his hand from between them, eliciting a noise of annoyance from Krennic. He regards the man beneath him for a long moment. Pulling himself off Krennic he adjusts his clothes and turns to cleaning his blaster. 

‘It demonstrated Imperial might and made it clear to the rebels that there is a power greater than their resistance in the galaxy.’ 

Krennic sits up with a huff and glares. He wants to say, Jedha would have served exactly the same purpose. But doesn’t. Tarkin has been shifting around him as if treading different water than Krennic and he cannot fathom what has changed. He wonders if he should dig into the thought but decides against it. Doing so will produce nothing useful, and their current argument is an old one. One they memorized their lines for back on Coruscant, if not before on the Death Star. It becomes circular and usually ends with one of them either stomping off somewhere. As they’re in enemy territory stomping off anywhere is a bad idea so they sit in not an ungentle silence.

 

/


	4. Chapter 4

It the next morning, their third day of recon, when they are caught. 

They had started out early, as was their usual mode, to gain any last useful information before they advanced towards the destruction of the base. Tarkin had decided the focus should be on cataloguing exact numbers of rebels, supplies, ships and the like. 

‘If we could get inside, that would be ideal,’ he had said as they pushed through foliage. ‘I’m interested to know what their plan is.’ 

The first hour had been focused on the back half of the base but it is as they shift towards the front that things go sour. 

Tarkin is attempting to gauge numbers of rebels present, a difficult task given their uniform clothes and haircut. Krennic, kneeling beside him, mutters about there being a lot of fuel storage containers, which seems out of place, considering they have such ancient tech and no evident weaponry. 

A branch cracks, Tarkin whips around with blaster out to find a group of rebels surrounding them. Krennic slowly stands with hands up and turns around to see their assailants. The group stares at Tarkin and Krennic, Tarkin and Krennic stare back. It is one of the few times in Tarkin’s career where he thinks that the people attacking him are this perplexed. 

The silence is broken by one of the rebels who says a few lines. Tarkin doesn’t understand and so doesn’t respond and Krennic gives no indication of understanding. 

The rebel switches to stilted basic, ‘who are you?’ 

A mental calculation of risk of admitting identity. Tarkin decides against it. He remains silent.

‘What are you doing here?’ 

The surveillance equipment dropped to the ground speaks for itself. The rebel guards appear to not require answers to their questions and as quickly as they were surrounded he and Krennic are hand tied and lead out into the sun covered parade ground. 

A million estimations of escape routes run through Tarkin’s head. He weighs each one but finds, with only the two of them, they’re all mostly suicidal. Then again, going along also looks to be a dimly lit situation. 

Krennic is ahead of him pugnacious and angry. 

Tarkin wants to remind him to adjust his face. Wear a new look. Dress yourself differently. But can’t, because they’re being watched, and in single file. The parade ground beneath foot splits with weeds cracking up through slabs of permacrete. This land has not been maintained to any military standards Tarkin is aware of. Most rebel groups he has dealt with keep their bases orderly to the best of their ability. 

At the door to the base the rebel leading them speaks to another, this one wearing two stripes at her shoulder and with hair cut short to the skull. The short cropped hair is as uniform as their tunics. It makes identifying them even more difficult. Although, given the cult-like nature of the organization Tarkin suspects anonymity to be merely a secondary feature of the short hair. Primary feature being, perhaps, uniformity. A means to deprive individuality therefore to maintain greater order. 

  
  


The two-stripped officer, for lack of a better term, opens the door to a well lit hallway. It’s narrow, no more than two shoulder’s across and exactly what Krennic intimated it would be inside. Built for defence and ground-level combat the walls are thick and sturdy. Oh yes, Tarkin thinks, they most certainly would need additional aide in receiving communications with walls like this. A dish or a rod would be absolutely necessary. 

So why isn’t there one? 

The hall has branches leading off from it, one to a large cavernous room - shuttle storage possibly. Another room gives off intense heat and a deep glow. Yet another contains the hum of machines, a manifestly different hum from that of the ceremony. They walk on and there are others and others - a food hall is glimpsed, offices, miscelania and sundry. 

What strikes Tarkin is the glimpses he can catch of the technology in the rooms - the communications equipment, the fuel charges inside, the navigation technology, surveillance and so on - is modern. Not Imperial standards up to date, but certainly a good deal newer than what Tarkin and Krennic have seen thus far. The blasters and hoverships are forty years old, the technology inside the building is five, ten years at most.

The incongruity bothers him. He wishes they had a better look at the main storage hall and communications hub. Just to get a sense of where each bit is from. Whose skeletal ships did they steal it from? 

  
  


Eventually, they come to stop and the leading officer opens a door to a cell and Tarkin and Krennic find themselves pushed in with unceremonious grace. 

The lead officer looks down her nose at them. She says, ‘the Capito will want to speak with you.’ 

‘Capito?’ Krennic repeats. ‘The captain? The head?’ 

‘Yes.’ 

She turns on her heel and the door is closed. 

‘Means both,’ Krennic says in the gloom of their cell. ‘Capito. Head of the body or captain.’ 

‘That makes sense.’ 

‘Yeah, it’s the little I remember.’ 

Tarkin finds a clean looking place against the wall and slides down to a sitting position. Krennic hovers by the door a moment longer before joining Tarkin on the floor. Rustling closer Krennic leans against Tarkin’s shoulder. He twists so he can whisper by the Grand Moff’s ear, ‘they said something about things being moved soon.’ 

‘Did you catch anything else?’ 

‘They called us some sort of insult.’ 

‘Oh?’ 

‘ _ Scritis _ . Mel, my grandma, used it say it. She said my mother was one.’ 

Tarkin can imagine several things that  _ scritis _ could mean, given the context, but feels it odd to call military prisoners whores or sluts or not-good-enough-for-my-son. The grandma calling the presumed daughter-in-law something like that explains a good deal about Krennic. But then, Tarkin recalls, everytime he has thought this sort of thing Krennic goes and does something to undo the understanding Tarkin has come to. 

Sometimes he recalls that he once thought Krennic a simple man. 

Krennic rests his chin on Tarkin’s shoulder. Their hands are still bound with manicals beginning to ache. A sigh, Tarkin feels a brush of lips against his cheek, Krennic pulls away and leans back against the wall. Their shoulders still touch. 

The cell is at most eight by eight with a step up to the door. The walls are chipped plaster with rock beneath. Hard stone. Cold stone. Despite the heat of the planet, the interior of the base is cool and damp. The cell especially so. 

What little light they have comes from a barred viewport in the door, head high, no more than two hands across. Above them, high up on the wall, is a viewport to the outside. This one covered in transparisteel so they can see sky.

 

 

‘I hate cells,’ Krennic complains after several hours. ‘I thought I was done with them on the Death Star.’ 

‘You might want to reconsider your life choices since you keep ending up in them.’ 

‘Mostly your fault. I didn’t have to be chucked in on the Death Star. You know that, I know that, Wilken’s bleeding plant knew that.’ 

‘It served a purpose.’ 

‘Some purpose,’ Krennic’s voice drops low. ‘My battle station is still gone.’ 

‘Indeed.’ 

Krennic, giving up on the topic for the moment, shifts, stretching out legs and slouching more onto Tarkin. He says, ‘you know what I wonder?’

‘Not particularly.’ 

‘Why didn’t they recognize you?’ 

Tarkin, having expected a lecture on some obscure architectural theory or further lamentations on the Death Star, blinks. 

‘Pardon?’ 

‘They didn’t recognize you.’ Krennic says. ‘They looked right at you and didn't know who you were. You’re not exactly  _ unknown _ , even in the nether-regions of the galaxy they know your face. It’s plastered to half the Imperial propaganda, after all. You’re the famous Grand Moff.’ 

Tarkin, ignoring Krennic's sneering of his title, hums, ‘that  _ is  _ odd. And as rebels they ought to be up to date on the identity of high ranking officers.’ 

‘Neither of us are exactly inconspicuous. Which leads me to the other thing I was wondering.’ 

‘Joy.’ 

Though he is not looking, Tarkin knows Krennic smiled at that. 

‘The Emperor, in his wisdom, sends two of the more well known officers off on a covert mission, one of them being the governor of the Outer Rim. That... _ literally _ doesn’t make sense. We are not the people you send on recon. You send nobodies like Lieutenant Adkin. People no one knows. Expendable people.’ 

‘Everyone is expendable in the Empire. That’s the point, the whole is greater than the individual.’ 

‘Yes, yes, but you take my meaning. There’s something else going on and you’re not telling me. Also, the Imperial Senate was dissolved which means the centralization of the government requires its key players to be accessible. Having one of them fucking about on semi-abandoned planets is ludicrous.’ 

Tarkin silently agrees but aloud repeats that he has told Krennic all he knows. There is nothing to add to it for the moment. 

Krennic, with customary lack of grace, accepts the assurances. 

  
  


Outside, rain begins. The sound of drops on the window begins slow then gathers. Krennic adjusts himself so he is lying down with head in Tarkin’s lap. Tarkin rests his still cuffed hands on Krennic’s shoulder and leans back against the wall. The permacrete floor is cool beneath them and already hurting to sit on for too long. 

Deep in the base the humming commences. It is a cyclical event, their chanting. Though it is dark outside it can’t be more than midday, or a little after. From their recon Tarkin places the chanting as occurring every eight hours regardless of weather. Which means, he thinks, this ceremony, and whatever else it is they are doing, has greater priority to infiltration, spying, and external others invading their privacy. 

Tarkin lines up everything he knows of the group. Catalogues it precisely, in an attempt to distract himself from the annoying fact that he agrees with Krennic about the mission. Krennic is onto something, with his speculations. A dread fact. 

Anytime the former-Director has been ‘onto something’ it usually ended in absolute chaos. The man attracts chaos the way Naboo attracts smugglers, wookies attract fleas, the outer rim, pirates. 

The mission had rubbed him wrong in the beginning, when the Emperor laid out the plan to him. It had seemed at once paltry yet weighted. There was something between the Emperor’s words he has yet to parse. He knows when he does, it will be unpleasant. 

What was it that Krennic said? When you dissect something, it’s not any prettier on the inside. 

That is the case of the situation with this mission. Needing to flesh out the answer Tarkin dives into introspective dissection. Why send one of the most well known men of the Empire on a wild chase of a mission? Being well known and easily recognizable is distinctly unhelpful in this line of work. 

His mind drifts backwards through the events, lining them up from _now_ to _then._ _Then_ being Scarif. Krennic turns around so he’s looking up at Tarkin with those very blue eyes only Tarkin can’t see the blue because they’re in a cell and everything’s grey. 

Fact: They failed the Empire. 

The greatest fault an officer can commit is failing and living. They did both. 

Fact: The Emperor usually does away with people who fail. By the force, or other means as necessary. But the Empire must be seen as strong, at all costs. Half of power is presentation and what message does it send if you execute the second most powerful man? It makes it seem like there are factions within, that there is a breaking apart of the whole, that the centre isn’t holding. 

Even if the centre is holding, the moment someone begins to think it isn’t then it’s only a matter of time before it becomes a reality. 

Fact: The Empire suffered two defeats, in short succession, at the hands of the rebels. Both aided through treason and moles. This speaks to a vertiginous state. 

Fact: Debts must be paid. 

So, if executing the Grand Moff at the hands of the Emperor, or his chosen person, would sew further discord, executing in a roundabout manner is the most rational. If Tarkin were to die at the hands of the rebellion he becomes a martyr. His martyrdom would then be useful to the Empire. Martyrdom and glory only matter when you’re stardust. 

Krennic, watching his face in a calm manner, reaches up with his hands and one of them touches the edge of Tarkin’s chin. ‘Ah,’ Krennic says calmly. ‘Yes, I thought it was something like that. It’s what I would do were I emperor.’ 

‘Do you think about being emperor often? Don’t answer that. It’s best I not know.’ 

  
  
  


Tarkin knows they were captured around 1100h, the ceremony prior to that had been at 0600h. They heard the following one at 1400h. Then they heard the one at 2200h. Then they dosed. 

No interview with this Capito. No interest in them at all. Tarkin is surprised. 

Krennic sneers, ‘are you offended that they haven’t recognized you yet? Appalled that there hasn’t been any fanfare over our capture yet?’ 

‘You are being ridiculous.’ 

‘You,’ Krennic reaches up, he has again returned to his position of using Tarkin’s lap as a pillow. His finger waves in Tarkin’s face. ‘Need a new word. What secret things keep them busy.’ 

‘Sacred things, I shouldn’t wonder. Since they’re a cult.’ 

‘Ah, secret and sacred. Aligned. It’s true, I can see your skepticism. But the words  _ secret  _ and  _ sacred _ are siblings. The sacred word is secret and cannot be spoken without consequence. The unnerving force of  _ naming  _ casts a spell over language but if you take away that name. When  _ hoc est corpus,  _ this is my body, becomes  _ Hocus pocus _ language is undone, made ridiculous. The ridiculous cannot be dangerous. The ridiculous cannot be secret or sacred.’ 

Krennic doesn’t know where he’s going with this. During his speech Tarkin has closed his eyes so Krennic cannot tell if he is sleeping or not. His breathing is even no matter the state of awakeness. He thinks, Is it courage to speak in fragments or in whole sentences? Or to speak at all. 

Am I dehydrated? Probably. 

‘I think it’s time,’ Tarkin says this with eyes still closed. 

 

Outside the small viewport Krennic sees that soft blue permeation of the sky that indicates the birth of day. He shifts up and rubs his face. 

‘All right, shall I yell for a medic? You’re old and dying, they open the door we cosh them on the head and bolt?’ 

Tarkin purses his lips, ‘I wouldn’t have put it quite like that.’ 

Humming begins, that rhythmic canting. It makes Krennic’s head hurt. The lack of water could also be why his head hurts. And the lack of caf and food. The list of the afflicted parts of his body add up.

They both heave themselves up and go to the door with Krennic standing directly at the small viewport and Tarkin off to the side. 

‘Hey,’ Krennic bangs manacles on the door. ‘Hey we need a medic.’ 

From his angle Krennic can see a single guard standing at the door down the hall. The guard appears to be reading and looks up only when Krennic calls a second time. With slow movements the guard comes down the hall to their cell. 

‘What is wrong?’ 

‘My friend, he needs a medic.’ 

Mild confusion. Krennic licks his lips and tries in the Lexrul dialect, certain that to the guard he probably sounds like a five year old. The guard does not appear surprised at the switch in languages and only frowns when Krennic stumbles over the verb tenses. It’s a piecemeal sentence composed of what he remembers from Mel and Callen. 

‘Oh,’ the guard nods. ‘Yes. I will see him.’ 

Krennic stands back as the guard unlocks the door and steps in. Tarkin moves fast and it is a blink before the man’s neck is snapped and he lies crumpled on the floor. 

Krennic looks down at the guard then back up, he smirks, ‘that was hot.’ 

Tarkin snaps, ‘get a move on.’

 

Luck is on their side as the guard has keys to their handcuffs and both are soon free. Tarkin pats the body down, finding a blaster, a taser, and a small flimsy-copy book but little else. On a leather strip around the guard’s neck is a pendant made of copper. It is a circle with a line jutting up from the top and looping around to make a smaller, hollow circle. He pockets it. 

The hall of cells is deserted. The chanting can still be felt, rather than heard, in the reverberations through walls. It makes Krennic’s skin itch. He wants to scratch, to shudder and run. It is maddening. 

Exiting the cell block they come to the main hall they had been lead through and also find it deserted. Krennic assumes everyone, save their dead guard, is at the strange ceremony they are so committed to performing. Tarkin leans in and whispers, ‘the door we came in will lead us to the main parade ground where they perform their rituals. We need to find another way out.’ 

‘Shouldn’t be too hard,’ Krennic says. ‘These Pre-Edgalian bases are star-like, as in they’re built in a radial fashion with everything leading to a center node. Unless the preliminary design has been altered, which given the age of this building is quite possible, we should be able to cut along here then take a left at some point. That will get us at least in the vicinity of an exit.’ 

Tarkin nods, hands Krennic the taser who mutters that next time  _ he  _ gets the blaster. They scoot down the main hall until they find one that bisects it. Krennic motions to the left and they turn the corner to find it as deserted as the initial hall. 

‘Not much for security are they?’ Krennic whispers as they come to another intersection, still empty of people. 

Despite the lack of rebels, there remains the pernicious feeling of being watched. In the forest, Krennic put it down to vegetation. The probability of there being nasty animals around who would look at a human and think, Oh meal time. But here? He isn’t sure. The base is claustrophobic. He is desperate to be free of it. 

At last, after a few more turns, they come to a door. Blasting the lock open they transfer themselves from cool, clinging air of the base to the hot, clinging air of the swamp. 

Halfway from the base to the tree-line they hear a cry of ‘halt!’ Krennic finds himself stopped by Tarkin, who grabs his arm. A glare from the Grans Moff, Krennic responds with a look of ‘fine.’ A lone guard runs forward but before the guard draws his blaster Tarkin shoots him in the shoulder, knocking him onto his back.  

Tarkin walks over, collects the blaster and hands it to Krennic, then hauls the guard up to hit him on the back of the head with the butt of his own blaster. 

‘Just kill him,’ Krennic snaps. ‘Or are you going soft in your old age?’ 

‘We need information, Lieutenant-commander, so help me shift him.’ 

‘Oh. Right.’ 

Krennic complains under his breath about unnecessary baggage as he grabs the other side of the man and they run into the forest. 

Deciding to keep away from their camp they walk in a spiral out from the base for a good twenty minutes before finding a space to stop. The guard is dropped onto the ground, his tunic stripped from him and ripped to make impromptu facinings. They locate the one reasonable-sized tree in the clearing and tie him to it. 

Tarkin squats in front of the man, sizing him up. The guard looks to be in his twenties, fresh faced with brown hair shorn close to the skull in the manner of his group. Average build, no evident signs of any sort of physical or military training. In fact, the man bears something of an appearance to a scholar or aesthete more than that of a soldier. 

Krennic leans against the tree surveying the jungle around them. At every sound he jerks his head towards the noise, left hand twitching over the blaster. 

‘Feel free to wake him and grill him for information any time now,’ Krennic hisses. ‘I don’t want to stay here for long, now that they know they’re not alone.’ 

The man’s eyes flutter open with a dazed look then quick realization of what sort of situation he is in. Tarkin holds his hand out to Krennic, ‘taser?’ 

It’s dropped into his palm. The man looks at the taser with certain knowledge of its future application. 

‘Now,’ Tarkin begins in a conversational manner. ‘We’re a bit pressed for time so I might have to be ungentlemanly sooner than would be strictly necessary under different circumstances. So, I make you the usual offer of the easy way or difficult way.’ 

The young man’s eyes remain on the taser. He does not speak and sweat drips down forehead, neck, seeps into the undershirt he wears beneath the tunic. 

‘Lieutenant-commander, give him the long and short in whatever language he speaks.’ 

Krennic does not wish to say his grandma’s use of the language did not allow him to gather the necessary words to explain that the boy was going to be tortured until he fessed up all he knew. And even, if he spoke willingly, that doesn’t preclude the use of the taser or particularly sharp sticks beneath toenails. 

He settles for a version of, ‘just tell him what you know or there will be pain.’ Though Krennic thinks the guard understands the situation without the translation. 

The guard shakes his head. Tarkin sighs in a disappointed manner. 

‘Did you inform him of our time constraints?’ 

‘In a manner of speaking. I told you I only know a cursory amount.’ 

‘Very well,’ the taser is turned on. The young man pales further. ‘How many are there?’ 

Krennic provides a rough translation. 

The guard does not answer. Tarkin takes up a remnant of the guard’s shredded tunic and shoves it in his mouth before applying the taser to his lower chest, just at the bottom of the right rib cage. The guard’s eyes go wide with the initial shock, then he screams. Or tries to scream but there’s his dirty tunic in his mouth. This round is brief, only a few seconds, before the taser is off and the rag out of the guard’s mouth. 

‘How many?’ 

‘Not many,’ the guard whispers. ‘We’re not many.’ 

‘I need a number.’ 

The guard provides it in his language and looks at Krennic. 

Krennic thinks for a moment then says, ‘one fifty.’ 

‘One hundred fifty?’ 

‘Yeah.’ 

‘All right,’ Tarkin nods. ‘That was easy, wasn’t it? Who’s in charge?’ 

‘Capito.’ 

‘What’s his name?’ 

The guard shakes his head. The rag is shoved back in and taser applied. The first round had been no more than ten seconds, this time it is upped to twenty. The boys knees twitch and he tries to dig his heels into the dirt as if to escape. His face has gone from white to red. 

The rag is removed. 

‘What’s his name?’ 

‘Pietri.’ 

‘No other name? No second name?’ 

‘No.’ 

‘Are you sure?’ 

A nod. 

‘How is your faction organized?’ 

This is roughly translated and again the guard shakes his head. This third round is when the man wets himself half screaming, half sobbing. Another application and he is weeping, snot running down his nose, and his body is twitching. Tarkin thinks he’ll have to switch tactics soon, the human heart can only handle so much before it gives out. They are luck the guard is young and evidently healthy. It makes information extraction less risky.  

‘Three,’ the man whispers when able.

‘Three what?’ 

‘Three layers, we’re bottom. Capito answers to another Capito who answers to the --’ 

The sound of people cutting through underbrush disturbs them. Tarkin twists around and can see through foliage the shapes of those moving towards them. 

‘Let’s go,’ he says, standing. 

Krennic nods, pushes his blaster against the young man’s head and pulls the trigger. 

  
  
  


They change direction to the west in an attempt to lose their pursuers. Krennic, as they bolt through trees, trying to not trip on roots and vines, says, ‘we should have asked about the technology. We should have asked where they were going with it.’ 

‘There are a lot of things I wish we had time to ask.’ 

They stop when they come to impassible swamp water. Tarkin looks over his shoulder and while he cannot hear or see anyone, he does not trust them to be entirely safe. 

‘Come on, this way.’ 

They move north, treading along the water’s edge for a time before turning back east. Only after half an hour of easy silence does Tarkin begin to relax. He thinks it odd that the people did not pursue them to the ground. They are escaped prisoners who killed two of their own. Surely the rebels would want them back for questioning, at the very least? 

Another half hour passes and though it is still early morning it is already hot. Krennic follows after Tarkin muttering complaints under his breath about how he is sore and tired and hungry and hadn’t the rebels any decency to feed their captives? 

Another half hour and Krennic announces, ‘we’re deeply lost.’ 

‘Yes.’ 

‘I always wanted to die covered in sweat and mud on a shit-hole planet.’ 

‘No need for melodrama.’ 

Yet after another half hour before Tarkin stops. Motioning for Krennic to keep watch he pulls himself up into a tree. 

‘See if you can find your sense of humour while you’re up there,’ Krennic calls after him. ‘I know you have one.’ 

Tarkin does not deign to answer. Going as far up as he can manage before the branches cannot hold his weight, he finds a break in the canopy. From the vantage point he can see the top of the base, estimating that they are no more than a mile and a half from it he gauges the rough route of return and descends back down. 

‘This way,’ he says once landed. 

‘They have all our surveillance equipment.’ 

‘But not our transmitters or communication devices, thankfully. We’ll pick up new recon equipment once we’re off here.’ 

‘And when will that be?’ 

‘Soon.’ 

Krennic, apparently satisfied with that answer, lapses into silence. Tarkin counts his blessings while he may. Krennic, being an expanding sort of person, takes up a lot of space mentally, verbally, intellectually. 

‘You missed something,’ Tarkin says suddenly. ‘When you were talking about the relationship between the words sacred and secret.’ 

‘Oh so you were awake.’ 

‘ _ Secretus _ , from which secret originates, means to set apart or separate. Secrets are kept apart from the known. They are othered, in a sense. Sacred performs the same ritual of removal. What is sacred must be kept apart from what is mundane.’ 

‘That is very true. I never know if you pay attention to my ramblings.’

Tarkin does not know what to do with the pleasure Krennic evidently finds in this realization. Instead of sitting with the uncomfortable feeling, for Krennic is not a comfortable man, he continues, ‘although sacred comes from a different word origin--’

‘I suppose I ought to have called them cousins rather than siblings.’ 

‘Indeed, or rather, their ideas are tangential to one another. They are married concepts of separation. Sometimes separation for the purpose of maintaining purity or holiness, sometimes separation for the purpose of secret-keeping unrelated to matters cult-ish.’ 

‘Both also have an inside and outside, they must, that is the nature of secrets whether they be sacred secrets or earthly secrets. The reality, or the “true nature” of any cult, we perceive if we’re outside it, is not  _ actually _ the reality. We’re external and so do not know it’s inner workings, it’s secrets. Take this lunacy here,’ Krennic motions in the direction of the base. ‘Our understanding of them lacks depth. The cult we have understanding of is both there and not there. It is both all and incomplete.’ 

Tarkin turns the thought of the secret and sacred over in his head as they finally make their way to recognizable land. Once back in known territory all thoughts of language and understanding flee in favour of being alert to danger. 

Keeping to the outer most of their previous routes to the base they make their way, at long last, to the fighter. It is undisturbed. A small mercy. 

‘We need to regroup,’ Tarkin says. ‘Get new supplies and rethink our strategy. This operation is clearly larger than anticipated or, I believe, known.’ 

Krennic agrees as he scoops up his bed roll, grabs a spare pack and pushes what supplies they have left into it. There is only their tablets, other various com’s equipment, the outdated blasters taken from the guards, and cooking implements. Everything else remains at the base. 

‘I don’t like how good they are at remaining covert,’ Krennic says, clearing away the plant coverings from the fighter. ‘To my knowledge no one knows about them. Or knew about them. Any incoming messages?’ 

Tarkin checks his tablet and shakes his head, ‘no. Nothing. We need somewhere I can contact the Emperor with reliable connection. Somewhere discreet.’ 

Krennic thinks for a moment then, seeming to come to a decision, hauls himself into the front seat. ‘I know a place, I’ll fly.’

 

/


	5. Chapter 5

Lexrul, what a sunburned planet. 

A sunburned planet with some of the most poisonous creatures in the galaxy. It also has one of the largest, living organisms beneath its seas. And one of the biggest, single monoliths standing starkly in its deserts. Caterpillars can kill you on Lexrul. As well as the usual spiders, various reptiles, butterflies, birds, marsupials. The ocean’s currents are fierce, its wind and sun unrelenting, its animals vicious. 

It is an uncomfortable place. 

Tarkin falls into his ritual pattern: oh so this explains Krennic. 

He feels, rather than thinks, this  _ actually _ might be the closest home truth of the matter. 

Over the comm link Tarkin says, ‘this isn’t, exactly, what I had in mind.’ 

‘We were in the quadrant and in desperate circumstances.’ 

This is owned to be true but Tarkin thinks it dubious reasoning. Besides, if anyone is going to look for them, knowing they’re in this area, surely they’re going to look on a home planet. Tarkin considers what he remembers from Krennic’s file (which includes many speeding charges that he believes vastly under-represent Krennic’s manic flying skills) and there is little connection to Lexrul once the man joined the Future’s Program. So, perhaps there is something to hiding in plain sight. 

Krennic, when Tarkin tunes back in, is nattering on about conch-shell spiders which have enough venom in a single bite to drop a wookie. They like to hide in boots, Tarkin is warned, so be careful. 

‘Incidentally,’ Krennic continues, ‘no one knows why Lexrul’s insects and arachnids are so extravagantly toxic. Some inject enough poison into a single, small bug to kill a nerf. This would appear to be the most literal case of overkill. Still, it does mean that everyone gives them lots of space. Lexrul is one massive bloodstain that shows through no many how many layers of paint you put on it.’ 

  
  
  


As the fighter skims past a large city, Krennic takes on a touristy tone, ‘out your left you’ll see Sativran. Filthiest city in the galaxy. Nothing stays white for the fumes. Your skin smells of sulphur, tastes like burning rubber, which it can’t help since the garbage heap outside city lines, you can see it there, hasn’t ever not been on fire.’ 

‘I see why you left.’ 

‘I only put Sativran as home-city because no one knows any other place on Lexrul. Pointless to explain our geography to foreigners.’ 

Outside Sativran the land is orange and red. The buildings they’re leaving behind are sharp featured but wilting. It is a desolate emotion for an urban centre. 

Tarkin understands the resemblance to Doaba, the flat desert features are similar. Though unlike Doaba, Lexrul’s land is dotted with homesteads, small oil wells, wild brush. The emptiness is not as present as on the previous planet. 

‘Where’s this rock you told me about once?’ 

‘It’s a ways off. Can’t see it from here.’ 

The land shifts, Tarkin can see a gorge and they slip towards it then down between cliff walls. Thin water beneath them, large boulders, detritus of trees piled up from flash floods. Pillars rise out the ground, striped red and white, and creatively shaped from that unending process of erosion. Coming out of the gorge the land has changed. Still rocky, but with more plant life than before. More browns, dusty greens, less red. Plenty of those bristly, bare shrubs of dry country. In the distance, signs of mighty forestry. 

‘That’s the coast,’ Krennic says. ‘The jungle there goes down about half of it then shifts to plains.’ 

‘I haven’t seen much in the way of animals.’ 

‘Yeah, they’re scarce in these regions. We’ve got some weird marsupials, your favourite beast, but that’s in the south. Up here it’s tesoons, think nerfs but smaller, bonier, and with much less fur. Various reptiles. Birds. Large birds. Large, usually angry, birds.’ 

‘Can they kill you?’ 

‘Probably.’ 

Tarkin nods in appreciation. He likes a land that makes an effort. 

Scrubland becomes plains and Krennic slows the fighter down before stopping some ways from a building settled just inside the lip of a forested area. Tarkin thinks the word forest too grand. Lightly wooded space? 

Descending from the fighter they gather packs and minimal supplies. Nearby is an oil well looking undersized and alien in a landscape with so little human imprint. The house, shadowed by prickly trees, is wood and permacrete. Tarkin glances over to Krennic and finds a clenched jaw and determined expression. 

‘Is this near where you and your uncle started the underground fire?’ 

‘No. And it was an accident. Best not to mention it.’ 

Tarkin smirks. 

Krennic starts towards the building but a few meters away he holds up his hands and shouts, ‘just me, Esma. And a friend.’ 

‘You alone?’ A voice calls back. 

‘We’re alone.’

Tarkin whispers, ‘we liable to get shot if we come closer?’ 

‘Something like that.’ 

After a moment Krennic appears to sense an ‘all clear’ and begins to walk again. Coming up to the porch a door opens and there stands a terribly enthusiastic looking woman of about eighty leaning against a large, dated crossbow that possibly once belonged to a wookie. 

She says, ‘you didn’t send word.’ 

‘I was busy, Esma.’ 

‘You didn’t think to send word.’ 

‘Yes, because I was busy.’ 

‘Too busy to send word?’ 

‘Yes.’ 

‘Well, I suppose that’s all right then.’ The woman, Esma, adjusts her face so it becomes somewhat wounded in expression. Straightening up, she stands the way a once-tall woman stands though she be partially hunched with age. Her hands are broad, skin permanently tanned and freckled. Her hair quicksilver.  _ Scritis _ is what she had once been called. Tarkin thinks Krennic’s grandmother a bold woman. ‘If you were too busy.’

‘This is sort of a secret thing, Esma. I’m not here, you see.’ 

‘No, I suppose you couldn’t be.’ She turns around and says into the house, ‘Our Orson says he’s not here, Nial.’ 

‘He can’t be, he’s got that Grand Moff with him. The likes of _ him  _ are never present anywhere at any particular time.’ 

Tarkin thinks, Stars this really is a bit much. Couldn’t have Krennic found an old friend for them to hide away with? An obscure colleague who doesn’t care they’re pariahs of the empire? Does it have to be  _ family _ ? Does it have to be  _ parents _ ? 

‘Er, yes.’ Krennic says stupidly. ‘Yes I have got him with me. He’s the friend.’ 

Esma regards her son for a long moment then says, ‘well it looks like you’re healthy and in one piece, come inside. I suppose you must be thirsty.’ 

‘This isn’t at all what I meant,’ Tarkin hisses as they pass inside. Krennic shrugs. Mutters that Tarkin should be more specific, then, shouldn’t he? 

‘So we’re only here for a few days the most,’ Krennic says as they are settled at the table. Water is procured and eventually food begins appearing. ‘And then we’ll be out of your hair.’ 

‘I don’t mind. Haven’t seen you recently.’ 

‘Been busy.’

‘Yes.’ Esma gives him a look. ‘You were born busy. Well eat, then. Nial will be around in a moment to see you. He’s through the back with the hoverboat. I suppose you’ll need a bed.’ 

‘We can kip wherever.’ 

‘I’ll see about your old room.’ 

‘ _ Really, _ we can kip wherever.’ 

‘And a fresher, I suppose you’ll need a fresher too.’ 

‘Esma.’ 

‘Clean clothes, food to go if you’re leaving us, what did you come in? Oh yes that fighter, should we get Bins over tomorrow to give it a once over? He’s gone into mechanics like his dad, did you hear? What else-’

‘ _ Mum. _ ’ Krennic’s jaw line has not relaxed and he hasn’t looked at Tarkin since they stepped inside because he can’t look at Tarkin. ‘We’re fine.’ 

‘Actually, clean clothes and a fresher sound lovely,’ Tarkin says amiably. 

The food, despite Krennic’s protestations to their  _ fineness _ , is also appreciated and disappears itself from the table in a speedy fashion. They eat in silence. It’s a strange feeling, being inside a building, sitting on chairs, eating food that isn’t pre-packaged, dried survival meals developed by the military. 

Esma reappears with towels and old work-clothes. ‘These are Nial’s, they should do you for the night. Fresher’s not moved since you left.’ 

Krennic finally twists to look at Tarkin, ‘upstairs, first door on your right.’ 

Tarkin obligingly disappears with towel and clothing change. 

  
  
  


This leaves two. Krennic does not wish to be analysed which is what is going to happen now that they’re alone. This always happens when he comes home. These attempts to trace something of the child his parents had onto the man in front of them. Thankfully, Nial stopped trying decades ago. Esma, though, still wishes to see a bit of her boy. Krennic assumes he disappoints every time. 

‘Well?’ Esma asks, taking a seat across from him. ‘What’s going on?’ 

She has aged since he last saw her. He has aged since she last saw him. There is so much time and space between them. 

‘We’re fine. Nothing you need to worry about.’ 

‘That Grand Moff is here, of course I’m worried,’ her voice drops to a whisper. ‘Everyone knows his reputation. Is there to be a battle?’ 

‘No.’ 

‘But there’s going to be something?’ 

‘It won’t touch you.’ 

‘That’s not what I’m worried about.’ 

Krennic shrugs. Esma purses her lips. They sit at an impasse. He can hear the fresher upstairs running, the sound of Nial doing something outside with the hoverboat, in the distance that animal lulling. The bellows of reptilian crodiatas, chirps of birds, hum of insects. 

‘How’s Nial?’ He asks as Esma stands, placing both hands on table and pushing herself up. 

‘You can go out and see for yourself. I’m making tea.’ 

‘All right.’ 

She takes up the empty plates and disappears into the kitchen. Krennic sits back, rubs his face and runs hands through hair. A heavy weight settles in his gut when he’s on Lexrul. It is a sort of nostalgia tinged with weariness, shame and anxiety. What a place to be from. And stars, the house hasn’t changed. It’s the same wood slab table, same rickety chairs that have been repaired too many times, the same pictures, the same dusty flimsy-books, the same chrono ticking away hours.

It’s been fifteen years since he’s inhabited this space. Breathed this air. And fifteen years ago had been the first time in ten, and so on until you reach back to when he left for the Future’s Program because his parents didn’t know what else to do with him. Always coming home, as he did, with police tailing for speeding or reckless flying or some other minor infraction. Then there was the running wild and habit of being at the wrong place at the wrong time. A general refusal to do what was expected of him by family. What can parents do with such a kid? Have someone else raise them for a time. 

The sound of water boiling in the kitchen coincides with the fresher turning off. 

‘So you’re home then.’

Krennic turns to see Nial standing in the doorway. The back door, with thin screen, leads out to porch and the part of the swamp the house connects to, nesting against wood. He can see the back end of the hoverboat. Inky water. Nial is in work tunic, wiping oil off hands with a dirty rag. 

‘For a bit.’ 

‘Where’s the Grand Moff?’ 

‘Upstairs.’ 

‘All right.’ Nial doesn’t move from the doorway. He seems uncertain of how to be. Krennic makes a face, heaves himself up and saying alright Nial, I’ll come outside. 

‘Your mum’s pleased you’re home,’ Nial says. 

Standing at the railing Nial pulls up a rope with a bucket attached to the end. Inside are several beers and he passes one to Krennic. 

‘I suppose she is.’ 

‘You take care of that problem in the trash compactor at your work?’ 

‘What? Oh,’ Krennic blinks. ‘Yes, yes, that’s quite taken care of.’ 

‘Good.’ Nial leans against a post and seems to be done with the conversation. 

The porch also hasn’t changed. Because nothing has changed. It’s the same weathered wood, the same clay walls of the house, the same hoverboat that Nial has been forcing to work for the past sixty years. 

‘How’s the business?’ Krennic asks. The beer is tepid, like the water temperature. But that means it’s still cooler than the air and really, at this point, Krennic is badly in need of any drink no matter temperature or origins. 

‘Carrying on. Might get a lad on to help me.’ 

‘Probably wise.’ 

‘Esma wants to send to Sativran for a lad.’ 

‘You’re not getting younger.’ 

‘Don’t know that I need a lad, yet.’ 

‘Well, let me know how it works out.’ A charitable feeling passes through Krennic and he says, ‘I’ve got a colleague who has family on Lexrul. She might know someone.’ 

‘Oh well, that’d be good of you.’ 

‘I’ll ask.’ 

Nial taps a rhythm out on the bannister for a minute then says, ‘so you not here long?’ 

‘Bit of a layover. Less said the better.’ 

‘Work going well?’ 

Krennic doesn’t say, Explosively. Instead, ‘oh you know. We’ve had a few setbacks but nothing untoward.’ 

‘I’m glad to hear it.’ 

Krennic fidgets, wonders if he can escape to the fresher yet or if he should stay and force this conversation on to more awkward, easily evaded questions. He decides that the fresher wins. 

‘I’m going to catch a shower,’ he says finishing the beer. It is deposited in the bucket by the back door. The bucket that’s always been there. He used to collect bottle caps from it as a child and string them together. He pulls the screen door open, allows his eyes to adjust to the inside then grabs the towel and spare clothes Esma laid out for him and heads upstairs. 

  
  
  


By the time Krennic has washed, shaved, dressed and emerged from the fresher Esma has tidied up his old room that now serves as a spare and storage space. He peaks his head in and finds Tarkin passed out. 

Behind Krennic Esma says, ‘I hope it’s adequate.’

‘Better than what we’ve been sleeping on the last two months. I’ll kip on the couch.’ 

She motions to spare sheets by the door and Krennic picks them up, tucking them beneath his arm. Before he can move to go down the stairs, Esma grasps him into a hug. She smells like dish soap and animal feed which is what she has always smelled of. He realizes that he’s always found the scent of dish soap comforting and this is possibly why. 

‘All right,’ he grumbles, pulling away. ‘It’s not like I died and came back from the dead.’ 

‘I wish you’d come around more, Orson. We never see you. Just snippets in the holopaper. We heard you were made a Director of some program. That sounds very impressive.’ 

Krennic smiles tightly and pats Esma’s shoulder, ‘less said the better.’ 

Her brow wrinkles in an expression of “oh no, what now.” 

‘Nothing,’ Krennic says defensively. He detaches from her as she goes to give him a second hug, this one meant to be comforting.

‘Oh Orson, you can tell me about it.’ 

‘Rather wouldn’t.’

He's halfway down the stairs and she is behind him, trying to touch his shoulder or arm. She thinks to give comfort and Krennic cannot begin to explain anything because it's all so complicated and they wouldn't understand and it'd require org-charts and hours, days he doesn't have. 

‘I’m sure you did all you could. Or, you know, I’m sure you tried.’

‘Very encouraging.’ 

Bitten, but forgiving, she stands on the landing watching him lay out sheets on the couch and procure a pillow from the chair Nial usually sits in come evening. It’s squashed so he does his best to massage it back into pillow shape. 

The exhaustion hits. It’s akin to a brick in the face and Krennic worries he’s going to begin falling asleep as he stands. He puts the pillow down at one end of the couch, watches as it deflates into squished root vegetable shape. Everything becomes very intense. 

‘I think I’m going to sleep for a bit,’ he says. ‘Half an hour. Wake me up if the galaxy ends.’ 

‘All right.’ 

Krennic does not wish to look at Esma’s face because her voice is very gentle and understanding. He wishes to be anywhere but here. He hates holopapers and the holonet and Tarkin and the rebels and Scarif and he just really, really wants to sleep. 

The couch is lumpy, smells humid and piney and is the closest thing to perfection he has ever slept on in his life. 

  
  
  


Tarkin wakes to unfamiliar pillow, bed, room. Oh yes, he recalls, Lexrul. Rolling to his back he looks up at the ceiling stripped with moonlight from the window. In one corner hangs a faded poster for a holonfilm decades old. Clearly a remnant from Krennic’s childhood. Apart from the poster, and a selection of hard-copy on architecture tucked in a corner, the room is neat and impersonal. Tarkin suspects that this was done post Krennic’s departure to the Future’s Program. The man has a wretched habit of sprinkling his belongings around like crumbs. There’s a trail to Krennic in any building he enters. Follow the cape, the flimsy, the pens, compasses, rulers, calculators, socks. He colonizes, Tarkin thinks, leaves his toothbrush behind when he hasn’t been invited to. 

Pulling his cleaned coat on, which was folded on top of his laundered clothes by the door to the room, he wanders downstairs. The main floor is two and a half rooms: the kitchen, then the dining area which bleeds into a sort of living room situation. He finds Krennic asleep on the couch, one foot hanging off. 

The backdoor is open leaving just the screen between the private and the wilderness, a perpetual state of affairs Tarkin suspects. He pushes the screen door open to the back porch. The moonlight is bright enough that he can see a hoverboat and small dock. 

‘Nice night.’ 

A man sits on a small bench with a cigarette. Ah, Tarkin thinks, this must be Nial. Krennic’s eccentric father. Or what I assume to be an eccentric father. Nial has the same face, same colouring, same build as his son. It’s like looking at Krennic from thirty years in the future. 

‘Indeed.’ He inclines his head. ‘Whiluff Tarkin.’ 

‘Nial Krennic, sir.’ 

‘I don’t mean to intrude.’ 

‘You’re not intruding. Smoke?’ 

Tarkin accepts. One is produced from a package and a lighter offered. Tarkin leans against the railing idly wondering if the senior Krennic is as chatty as his son.

‘You been to Lexrul before?’ Nial asks, blowing out smoke. 

‘No, I haven’t, though I’ve been in the quadrant many times.’ 

‘How do you find it?’ 

‘I haven’t seen much but what I have seen is certainly interesting.’ 

Nial gives a half smile. ‘Sure.’

Tarkin allows the silence to settle for a moment. He isn’t sure how to read the man. There is a calmness to him entirely lacking in Krennic. Steady, softly falling motions. 

‘I had a mad notion that one might understand someone better having seen their childhood home,’ Tarkin says when his cigarette is finished. He snubs out the remainder and deposits the butt in the bucket Nial put his which is full of bottles. 

‘I wouldn’t know about that, sir. I suppose it’s not necessary for your childhood home to signify anything other than it was your childhood home.’ 

‘Indeed.’ 

‘You seen any of our Orson’s buildings?” 

Tarkin thinks, All of Coruscant is Krennic’s buildings. You can’t swing a dead ewok without hitting one. 

‘Some,’ he answers. ‘They’re very different from what he grew up around it seems.’ 

‘Are they? I’ve never seen any I don’t think.’

‘Very linnear. Very...geometric.’ 

‘You spend much time outside of space stations and cities, sir?’ 

‘As a child and young man, plenty.’ 

‘Then you’ve seen the ah, the geometry of nature. Orson’s got a word for it about trees and mountains. He told me it once but I didn’t much care for it.’

‘The word?’ 

‘It was too much of that program he went off to. Not enough of the land.’ 

‘That sounds about right.’ 

Nial hums agreement though his gaze remains cautious. Tarkin has a distinct feeling that Nial doesn’t much care for  _ him, _ either. Not that a man needs a reason to dislike someone, Krennic is a grand example of someone able to dislike people for sport, but Tarkin wonders if he’s done something to offend. Probably. He’s done a good many things in his life. Most were necessary, very few of them  _ nice _ . 

Deciding he’s interrupted enough for the night he bids good evening. Nial waves him off and pulls out a second cigarette as Tarkin goes inside.  

 

/


	6. Chapter 6

Lexrul days are hot, sundrenched. Tarkin walks out to the fighter with Krennic trailing behind him. With the land that isn’t forest pale gold the sun reflects, stings the eyes. What a contrast to space, what a contrast to Rettna with its humid shadows. Both are in work shirts, trousers, boots. It’s too warm for anything else. 

‘I think I know a place we can hide it,’ Krennic says coming up beside Tarkin. ‘It’s a tricky landing so you can do the honours.’ 

‘Fine.’ 

They climb in and Krennic leans forward, over Tarkin’s shoulder, to punch in the navigation code, ‘that should get you to the vicinity, it’s not too far. We can walk back.’ 

  
  


The landing is, indeed, tricky. It’s a narrow patch of land within trees and Tarkin brings them down rough, unable to manage a landing with grace. Krennic points, again leaning close in over Tarkin’s shoulder, ‘there, we can tuck it over there.’ 

‘Did your sense of personal space disappear?’ 

Krennic smirks, settles back into his seat and says he was just trying to be helpful. 

The walk back is partly through marshland though nothing as soggy as Rettna. There are signs of humanity trespassing on the wilderness - fishing traps along embankments, tree branches rubbed raw from mooring ropes. 

‘People live in here?’ Tarkin asks, eyeing the husk of a hoverboat. 

‘Some do. I used to have a fort in here when I was a boy, somewhere over there,’ he gestures southward. ‘I doubt it still exists. Or if it does, it’s probably used by someone else now.’ 

Krennic is peering at Tarkin in a way the Grand Moff has come to recognize. It usually means invasive, personal questions are about to come his way. And this day Krennic does not disappoint. He chews something over in his head then spits it out, ‘your parents still alive?’ 

Tarkin side eyes the man. He reasons there is no other proper response. Krennic ignores him and continues, ‘I just realized that you never talk about them. Only that weird uncle of yours who I have decided I don’t like.’ 

‘Why do you not like my uncle?’ 

‘I just don’t. How would they be? Ninety? Centennials?’ 

‘They’re dead, Lieutenant-commander.’ 

‘Aha! I knew it.’ Krennic’s face shifts in nanoseconds. ‘I mean-’

Tarkin snorts before Krennic can finish the sentence. Krennic adjusts his face, asks, ‘did you like them?’ 

‘I can’t complain.’ 

‘That’s not answering the question.’ 

Tarkin shrugs. What does he think of his parents? Not much, really. Not that he looks down on them, not at all. They were hard, intelligent, respectable people. But just, he doesn’t  _ think  _ of them. They procreated. He is the outcome. They’re dead. He isn’t sure what else he is supposed to think about them. His upbringing was not nearly as  _ provincial  _ as Krennic’s. There is no need to develop complicated, elongated attachments to one’s parents. 

His parents make him think of space. His mother is the fact that beauty in space is best observed from several light years off lest it kill you. His father is the smell of gunpowder in transitioning chambers between the corrosive vacuum and the safety of the shuttle or station. These are descriptions he created for them when he was a young man and he hasn’t had time, or inclination, to revisit the memories of his parents enough to rewrite the lines. 

They have been walking in silence for the last ten minutes and that the silence is Krennic’s attempt at letting Tarkin ‘have space’ annoys him. 

He is about to warn Krennic off from asking such question in the future when the smell of fire hits. Krennic stops sharply, holds up his finger to indicate quiet. Tarkin obliges. They stand for a long moment as Krennec looks around, through trees, head jerking bird-like, before he suddenly smirks and lets out his strange laugh.  

‘Oh,’ he says. ‘It’s just Orthus.’ 

‘Orthus?’ 

‘Local distiller.’ 

‘Illegal?’ 

‘Deeply. It’ll strip the enamel off your teeth. Stars knows what he puts in it. I drank a bottle of his shit once and couldn’t stand for two days. Couldn’t feel the left side of my face for longer.’ 

They begin walking again. 

 

 

‘Do you miss them?'

It's asked as they come up to a split in the small trail they had been following and Tarkin can see the back porch, the hoverboat, a string attached to the banister that disappears into the water. 

‘Who?’ Tarkin asks. 

‘Your parents.’ 

‘No.’ 

‘Were you close?’ 

‘No.’ 

‘How about your terrible uncle?’ 

‘No and no and yes he’s dead, too.’ 

Krennic seems occupied with these answers making Tarkin’s skin itch. This need to burrow in for answers rankles. What does Krennic hope to do with such information? It cannot prove useful in the game of careers and military politics. It gains him nothing to know this sort of thing. Tarkin turns the questions and answers around, wondering if he said something that he hadn’t meant to that sparked this interest but cannot see it. 

They come up on the house and find it quiet, a note is pinned to the table from Esma saying she and Nial have gone to town and will be back later. There is food on the counter in the kitchen. 

Tarkin says that he will eat later, ‘there is work to do first.’ 

‘I’m multitasking,’ Krennic says as he appears with a plate in one hand, tablet tucked under his arm and a cup of caf in another. Tarkin grudgingly follows Krennic up the stairs to the spare bedroom and watches with raised eyebrow as the man awkwardly sits down on the floor without spilling either plate or cup of caf. 

Tarkin watches for a minute before saying that he needs to speak with the Emperor and will be downstairs. Krennic mutters ‘what I’m not invited?’ before waving him off in annoyance.

 

 

At the table downstairs, Tarkin opens his tablet and patches through to the Emperor. The clearest image of Palpatine he has seen in months projects before him. 

‘Ah, Whiluff, I have been awaiting news.’ 

Tarkin quickly provides an update to the Emperor of their recent escapades. He outlines what he believes the offensive capabilities are of that one base, let alone the others that the guard said were in existence. 

‘There are at least nine bases at this simple level functioning, but I can’t be certain,’ Tarkin says.

‘That is interesting news.’ 

Interesting isn’t how Tarkin would describe it. He continues, ‘I am loath to underestimate this threat. I believe that they are implementing a large scale operation, possibly in direct threat to the empire. I do stress that backup would be wise, in this situation.’ 

‘Unfortunately that can't be arranged.’ 

‘Why?’ 

‘There have been situations developing in a rapid manner elsewhere in the galaxy, you need not concern yourself with them at this precise moment, but they are the current priority for all available resources.’ 

‘Very well, if you believe that is best. I would like it noted that I caution against it. I believe we should strike hard and fast and take care of this threat now. Though, I do wonder how we haven’t heard of these rebels before. They’ve never shown up in our intel sweeps.’ 

‘They have been seen,’ that sly smile of the Emperor’s crosses his face briefly. ‘But were not of priority. You and that architectural engineer are there to make sure they do not become any more of an issue.’ The emperor’s expression becomes distant, ‘there is an issue with suns, Whiluff, and polygons. Though I hadn’t thought it’d be this soon. Carry on as planned.’  

Tarkin waits for more but there is nothing forthcoming. The Emperor is evidently finished with the call and with perfunctory bow of his head Tarkin signs off.

 

 

Upstairs he finds Krennic lying on his stomach thumbing through the images he had transferred from their scopes to his tablet before their untimely capture. 

‘Are all your conversations that cryptic? No wonder the administration of the Empire is a mess. And before you say anything, because I know you’re about to, there’s no insulation here. It’s a glorified shack. I could hear everything.’ Krennic rolls onto his back and sits up. ‘So we’re in it alone.’ 

Tarkin lowers himself down to the thin rug with a grimace. He says that it certainly appears that way. Not ideal, considering the numbers. This sort of operation requires some covering fire power. As he speaks he leans over and turns Krennic’s tablet off. 

‘I was working,’ Krennic complains. 

‘I know.’ 

Krennic sighs, mutters that it’s Tarkin who is incorrigible, not him. Tarkin pushes Krennic onto his back, straddles his lap. Kissing is something like a releaf. Like a form of bathing that way it rolls stress off shoulders, out of the pit of chests, base of stomachs. Krennic wraps an arm around Tarkin’s neck and uses his free hand to roll them so their positions are reversed. 

‘Give me a minute,’ he whispers against Tarkin’s ear and he’s gone through the door. Tarkin sits up and looks around but the room is as sparse as it was the night before - thin mattress, thin pillow, thin sheets, thin rug. Everything is thin. 

No wonder Krennic lives for lush fabrics and beautiful clothes. Having never been instilled with any sense of restraint, and evidently having grown up with not much, it’s only natural for a person to gravitate towards what had once been denied or never possible. 

There is a difference between choosing a sparse living situation for the purpose of rigour and military hardiness and having one thrust upon you. 

Krennic reappears and shuts the door with his foot. 

Their boots come off first then Krennic is hauling Tarkin to the bed so they’re lying width wise across it, feet still planted on the ground. Tarkin can feel Krennic hard against his thigh and he desperately wants the man naked and between his legs. 

Krennic, however, is occupied with kissing down Tarkin’s neck, delicately. Almost too delicately. It hurts sort of delicate. That special pleasure and pain that happens when being just  _ barely  _ touched. 

Then it is teeth against his jaw, his mouth and they’re rubbing against each other because it’s about time they’re clean and warm and on a real bed and Tarkin can’t decide if he wants to fuck Krennic face first into the floor or if he wants Krennic to do the fucking. 

They slide off the mattress back to the infernal floor. The soft wood, tired rug, their clothes are off now and Krennic pushes Tarkin’s thighs apart with eager hands. 

Against his neck Krennic breaths out, ‘I want you,’ as he strokes Tarkin’s prick. ‘Stars I want you.’ His head drops, kissing down chest. Canvassing stomach and hips, those sharp bones, Krennic is soon licking between legs, biting kissing up thighs, his hand still stroking Tarkin. There are going to be bruises on his hips, his thighs. He wants them all. 

Tarkin concentrates on the ceiling, while they are alone he still has no desire to make much noise but Krennic is sucking on his balls making it difficult. He breathes out, one hand curling into a fist, the other presses against his mouth. 

Pulling up Krennic kisses him, hands now at his hips and Tarkin understands the way they grope at him. Tarkin hisses, ‘you better have found something useful.’ 

‘I did, don’t worry.’ 

Tarkin huffs, rolls over and says this better be worth it. Krennic snorts, nips his ear, whispers that he wasn’t aware of any complaints in the past. Usually the opposite. Tarkin doesn’t deign to respond. 

Krennic fucks into him with a finger, then another. Tarkin feels the familiar ache in the base of his stomach and oh he cannot wait to have Krennic balls deep inside of him whispering filthy comments against ear. 

There is almost a gentleness, to the movements of fingers, Krennic’s other hand warm on his back. He wishes the man would just fuck him properly. Twisting partially around he snaps, ‘get on with it.’ 

Krennic rolls his eyes but does remove fingers and yanks Tarkin’s hips up and back towards him. On his knees with forehead resting on his forearm Tarkin breaths out as Krennic presses in. His eyes close because fuck it feels good, and Krennic’s hands tight on his hips are warm. The initial pause is short then Krennic begins thrusting into him roughly. Tarkin is muffling a moan as he hears a hushed whisper of ‘oh fuck yes’ from Krennic. A hand slides down his back, holding onto his shoulder and the angle changes slightly so Krennic is hitting deeper. Tarkin can feel his legs sliding further apart and the feeling of Krennic in him, knowing when he comes it will be over Krennic’s fingers, knowing when Krennic comes it will be inside him makes him want more. 

Stars he wants more. If Krennic could fuck him until the end of the galaxy that would be ideal. 

Tarkin comes as Krennic straightens up, hand moving from Tarkin’s shoulder back to his hip, and reaches around with the other to stroke him. Krennic makes an appreciative noise, body covering Tarkin’s, they slump over together. Krennic’s touch cerates remembrances on Tarkin’s skin for his hands are warm. 

  
  


See, Tarkin thinks, this is the problem when there is no structure. You bridge out of the realm of what is appropriate for your situation. That was too much of  _ something  _ to be  _ appropriate _ . 

  
  


Cleaned up and dressed Krennic pulls Tarkin close to him on the bed they’ve relocated to. He hums that he’s feeling significantly better. Tarkin, attempting to disentangle, says, ‘there is not space for extremes here.’  

‘Some say life thrives best at the edge of chaos, but I take your meaning.’ 

Tarkin doesn’t think Krennic actually does. Take his meaning, or understand it in full. The Emperor had warned of extremists and Tarkin wonders if he meant more than just the rebels. 

Krennic continues, lazily watching Tarkin gather his effects, ‘I suppose, one could argue that living life on the edge of chaos, considering that an extreme, is akin to living life to the best one’s abilities while one is able. I mean, if you don’t exist at the edge of the greatest possibilities what is the point?’ 

_ 'That _ is not the point.’ 

‘I think it is. I mean, we’re speaking broadly here. Thought-experimenting, if you will. If we’re talking rebels, then of course they should all be shot. I’m not here for  _ their  _ extremities.’ 

‘You’re being utterly ridiculous, Lieutenant-commander.’ 

Krennic smiles, opens his mouth then appears to think better of whatever he was going to say and shrugs. He says that Tarkin can think that if he wants, it’s his prerogative. ‘The way I see it: if you went and died tomorrow at the hands of those swampy rebels would you want to die while lacking something like bravery? I know you agree with me. You’re just being contrary to be contrary. On the Death Star we had a conversation about localized shifts causing broader systemic damage and you said, “The mathematics only suggests a greater need for courage.” Then you made a shoddy joke. But the point is, you have nothing against living life on the edge of chaos so long as you manage to bring it under some control. That’s the excitement, isn’t it? I think you just think you ought to have something against that pleasure.’ 

Tarkin, seeing such an asinine statement as not worthy of his time, replies, ‘I have work to do, if you’ll excuse me.’ Ignoring Krennic’s exacerbated sigh, he goes back downstairs with his tablet, out the back door to the small bench he had seen Nial sitting on the night before. Taking up residence on it he chooses not to respond when Krennic yells, ‘I’m going to go get us new supplies. If you die outside from something attacking you while I’m gone it’s not my fault.’ 

The front door slams. Tarkin sighs, closes his eyes as he leans back against the wall, and wishes Krennic had gone the way of Scarif. Everything would be so much better if that damn man were around. 

  
  
Touch has memory. What can you do to kill it and rid yourself of it in order to be free? How can you inhabit any sort of former liberty when there has been _ touch _ ?

 

/


	7. Chapter 7

The old hovercar Esma doesn’t much care for going out in as it has a penchant to break down at inopportune moments. But Nial has worked on it for as long as they’ve been married and it seems a shame to put it in the rust heap when it can still carry you a few hours at least. 

She stares out at the countryside, one hand holding her hat down and the other fiddles with the dials for music. A crackle comes through the comms, a jazzy sound but dies out shortly. 

‘Gonna get that fixed this week,’ Nial says in his soft way. 

‘All right.’ 

‘Gonna get the cover slider fixed too. Your hat won’t get blown off then.’ 

‘Sounds good.’ 

Nial chews over whatever thoughts he is having. Esma switches hands holding on to her hat. She ponders Orson’s recent arrival for a moment. All that secretness, but he was always a secretive boy. Abrasive, loud, frantic, but secretive. She loves him because he is her son but she never knew what to do with him. 

She tries, ‘Orson seems well.’

‘He does.’ 

‘I think something happened. You know we saw in the holopaper that he was made a Director of something?’ 

‘Weapons.’ 

‘That’s right, had to do with weapons. I don’t think he is anymore.’ 

‘Could be a good thing.’ 

‘Right,’ Esma sighs. ‘That’s true. Never much cared for him being in the military.’ 

‘No.’ 

‘Don’t much care for the Grand Moff, though you didn’t hear me say so.’ 

Nial flashes a thin smile. ‘No, I didn’t hear you say so. You didn’t hear me agree neither.’ 

‘You hear such fearful things about him. Do you think Orson’s all right?’ 

‘He’ll manage I’m sure.’ 

‘I suppose.’ 

The hovercar slows as they near an outpost station. Pulling up to the side with the most shade they decant and make their way in. The holonews is playing in the background as Nial goes up to the counter with the bucket of bottles. 

‘Here to deliver these,’ he says. ‘You got more chump?’ 

The man behind the counter holds up a hand and goes into the back. Esma wanders through the station picking up odds and ends. She wonders if Orson needs anything for whatever it is he’s up to. The blasters he came in with are as old as her, she swears, but there’s not much better here. And his clothes were worn but serviceable. She worries he might get cold, though. There wasn’t much in the way of proper lining in the coat. Even if he’s working in hot climates you never know. She wonders if he has a proper heated blanket in the fighter. Probably not. 

She listens to Nial and Lysoon talk weather and planting seasons for a quiet minute before she joins them, placing her goods on the counter. Lysoon counts over the items, nudges the bucket of chump, and gives a price. 

‘Went up in price did it?’ Nial asks amiably. 

‘Bad economic times, you know that.’ Lysoon grins. 

‘Not that bad.’ 

‘Hey, I have to do what I have to do. It’s difficult to do business in this sort of place you hear?’ 

‘Sure. But not that difficult.’ 

‘Fine,’ Lysoon sighs dramatically as he reworks the price. Nial purses his lips, leans back into his heels as he nods through the math. 

‘I suppose I’ll be wanting a top up,’ Nial says eventually. ‘For that price a top up on chump is fair.’ 

‘You’re asking too much of me, old friend.’ 

‘Not sure about that.’ 

‘Half a top up.’ 

‘Fine, fine. And a case of beer.’ 

‘Or a full top up and no beer?’ 

‘Suits me either way.’ 

‘Half a top up and beer, save one for me yeah?’ 

Nial hands over the credits and waves his hand, ‘you’re welcome anytime.’

 

Half-way to their next stop for the morning errands Nial says, ‘I think he cares in his own way.’ 

‘Who?’ 

‘Our Orson. Is that the base of your worry, love? That he can’t be having with us?’ 

‘Part of it,’ she sighs. ‘I just miss our family.’ 

Nial looks over at her with her hand holding onto her hat, the other clutching the bag of flour and herbs, the gentle sloping of her cheeks, the deep wrinkles and sun spots. He reaches over and squeezes her hand. He wants to say, ‘I do too’ but worries about how his throat will eat the words up. 

  
  
  
  


The issue at hand, Krennic thinks, is that there is a multiplicity of truths. But isn’t that the state of being human? Containing multiple truths. The truth you are as an architect. The truth you breath as an engineer. The truth you live in as a son. The truth you embody as a -- he cannot say the last word. 

Then there’s situational truths and all their multitudes. The truth as Krennic sees it, the truth as Tarkin sees it. The truth of what they talk around without speaking about. 

What is the origin of it? For himself he cannot find it. There is no form that proceeds it to trace back. And the truth of the matter (that unspoken matter, if it is unspoken can it be? If there is no word given to a situation does that situation exist?) is lacking its entirety. He feels like he is looking at a mountain but unable to see the full thing. Only bits and pieces from different angles, pushed together to make something of a whole but within it there are cracks. There is no one truth of any situation. 

Krennic had once thought objective truths of lived experiences were real. He had once believed, as people like Galen had believed, that there was immutable fact for experiences. People might lie to themselves about things sure, but in the end there was one objective fact of how a situation occurred and ought to be understood. 

What foolish thoughts of a more fearsome youth.   
  


 

For supplies he treks to the nearby town, Adeline, to buy decades old surveying equipment. Adeline is north from where he grew up and near the coast, only an hour by hoverbike and filled with buildings wearing that worn, weathered look of a town battered by oceanic forces. 

Adeline is all memories for him - that of forced family events, creche school, beating up Tindal Bouraine behind the holotheatre when he was ten. Tindal Bouraine had stolen his marbles and therefore had to pay the price of thieving which, by those wild, unwritten rules of childhood, meant getting the shit beaten out of him by Krennic and his mates. 

Funnily enough, Tindal Bouraine followed him to the Future’s Program in systems management. There is another thing that contains multiplicity: systems. But that is a Tarkin thought. Tarkin likes systems. His is a machine. Though Tarkin has wilderness beneath his skin he still remains a machine at heart. He  _ wants  _ to be wild, Krennic thinks, the way I  _ want _ to be orderly. While he believes Tarkin to be content on that knife’s edge of chaos, he is content so long as the mathematics are courageous. So long as there remains a system to be ordered. Or maybe, Krennic thinks reluctantly, I’m completely wrong. 

Silk threads, these wants slip through fingers. You cannot grasp what cannot be.   
  


 

Adeline is also the memory of cyclones, boarded up windows, pre-storm hush, standing down by the docks with his cousin watching the wall of black clouds build over the warm seas. The wind smelling of rain, the air static. His uncle dying from stupidity during the storm. His aunt doing that sort of moaning scream of loss. Them all huddling around the toilet as the house is torn apart. 

He sighs, finishes paying for the supplies and charts what needs to be purchased next. Dry food, he thinks, new blasters. Adeline is a whetstone for memory and it is best to be gone from here. 

Stars is it hot. Adeline shimmers. Its buildings are all of one particular architectural style dating from forty years ago when the city was flattened by the cyclone of Krennic’s childhood memory. Only five houses remained intact at the end of it. Now, buildings are constructed of firmer materials. Stern matter than can take a beating. 

Tarkin can go on all he wants about nature being the ultimate test for humans, something or other about mettle and endurance and stars knows what else. Krennic thinks nature is best when absolutely controlled and not allowed to wreak havoc. Put nature in a vacuum, contain it, render it docile. Domesticate it. That would be a true and worthy achievement of human kind. 

Having picked up surveillance equipment, dried food packs, and better blasters he loiters by a cantina. The smell of smoke, sweat and booze oozes out the door and Krennic considers having a drink. He ducks in to the cool shade and finds a seat at the bar and orders a beer. Above the bar the holonews plays. 

‘Do I know you?’ The bartender asks as he pulls the pint. 

‘No,’ Krennic says.

‘You look familiar.’ 

‘Must be I have one of those faces.’ 

‘Sure,’ the pint slides over. ‘Must be that.'

The holonews flicks from local to planetary to quadrant to galactic. There is the weather forecast (hot). A warning about some rain in the coming weeks. Then the anchor runs a clip of a military spokesperson saying ‘--and the skirmish with the rebel forces was dealt with in an efficient and timely manner. The Emperor has full faith that the insurrections at the hands of these violent rebels will soon come to an end and the people of the Empire will be able to rest easy knowing they are safe and secure.’ 

‘You know Nial?’ The bartender asks as the holonews flicks back to local concerns. After all, a rebel skirmish light years away is not important to the small people of Adeline. Of Lexrul. When you remove yourself from the axis of the military system it does become apparent how uninterested most people are in the comings and goings of battles. 

Krennic chews on that unhappy thought as he says, ‘never heard of him.’ 

‘You look like him is all. That’s where I’ve seen your face.’ 

‘Not my face if it was his, was it?’ 

The bartender shrugs, ‘you staying here for long?’ 

‘No.’ 

‘You should look him up, have a laugh. You’re him but thirty years younger. Could be his son you could. He has one I think, went off to some military program. He might be dead, though. Nial doesn’t talk much about him. Granted, Nial don’t talk much to begin with.’ 

Krennic finishes his beer and pushes the glass towards the bartender. Taking out a smoke he lights it, picks up his bag of supplies and says, ‘I’m off. Cheers for the pint.’ 

  
  
  


‘Did you know about the recent skirmish?’ Krennic asks, barging onto the back porch. Tarkin raises an eyebrow. ‘I saw it on the holonews in town. Also I got us supplies. The recon equipment is ancient but the best we’re going to get currently.’ 

‘There are always skirmishes with the rebels.’ 

‘Yes, but this one made the news in Adeline. If it made the news on this shithole planet then it was not just a scuffle over an obscure trade post or base.’ 

The sound of Nial and Esma returning stops Krennic for a moment as Esma calls through, ‘we heard there was some sort of battle.’ 

Krennic hisses, ‘if my bleeding parents are aware why weren’t we appraised? Why weren’t  _ you  _ appraised?’ 

Tarkin’s jaw clamps and he stands as Esma opens the screen door wearing a concerned expression. She says, ‘I hope it wasn’t anything too bad. Do you know anything, Orson?’ 

Krennic is noncommittal. Tarkin spins on his heel, stalks off into the yard punching with fury at his tablet. 

‘I guess it was a bad one,’ Esma says. 

‘No, he’s just upset he didn’t get to do any of the shooting.’ 

Esma purses her lips at the retreating back of the Grand Moff and says that some people let violence be their tongue and it’s a sadness to see. Krennic sighs, ‘it’s a bit more complicated than that.’ 

‘No,’ Esma pats his arm. ‘It’s not.’ 

Krennic quietly follows her inside resisting the urge to explain how she’s wrong. He is continually reminded about what different languages he and his parents speak. 

‘ _ Scritis _ ,’ Krennic says as he leans in the doorway of the kitchen. 

‘Oh,’ she draws out the sound as she takes out a boiler for caf. ‘I haven’t heard that in a long time. Nial’s mum was a hard woman.’ 

‘Was she.’

‘She never knew how to be gentle.’ Two mugs are placed on the counter. They are both blue, sky blue, Scarif blue. ‘What reminded you of her?’ 

His lip curls, ‘ran into some people who spoke Thalian.  _ Scritis _ means whore, right?’ 

Esma, full of delicate language, says that it can. But that is more of a regional variation. It originally meant non-believer or not-one-of-us. ‘I suppose you’d say whores are a  _ them _ .’ 

‘So, it’s sort of a broad way to indicate otherness?’ 

‘You can put it like that,’ Esma agrees. The caf finishes itself and is poured for both of them. Nial has taken himself off to the back porch to work on the hoverboat which, in Krennic’s experience, means he wishes to avoid all human contact. Esma and him retreat to the front and sit on sun baked wood watching the horizon. ‘Where’d the Grand Moff go off to?’ 

‘No idea.’ 

‘He isn’t what I thought he’d be like.’ 

Krennic doesn’t reply. He sips the caf, enjoys the bitterness, wishes he were up in space where it is cold and dark. 

‘I thought he’d be more of a politician,’ Esma continues. ‘He’s very cagey.’ 

‘Politicians can be cagey.’ 

‘Very polite, of course. How's it working with him?’ 

‘Aggravating.’ 

Esma sets her caf down and rests her hands on her knees. Her back is straight and she is squinting at the horizon. ‘You in trouble, Orson?’ She asks without looking at him. 

Krennic curses the intuition of mothers. 

‘No, Esma, I’m not.’ 

‘I know you do all sorts of secret work you can’t talk about. Nial said you’ve probably signed enough contracts that you probably don’t exist anymore.’ 

‘Something along those lines.’ 

‘I don’t like to think of it like that. I worry for you, Orson. Especially when you come home because you only ever come around when there’s trouble.’ 

He isn’t sure how to reply so remains quiet, turning the mug around in hand. He does not wish to look at Esma or the horizon or anything around him at the moment. Being planetside on Lexrul is confining. 

‘I just hope you know what you’re doing,’ Esma says at length when the silence gets to the point of needing breaking. 

‘Yeah, so do I.’ 

  
  
  


Dusk brings cool air and Tarkin. He slips in quietly through the front door. Krennic is on the couch scribbling away on flimsy redesigning Adeline for something to do. Tarkin sits in a free chair and watches for a moment. 

‘The Emperor still won’t grant backup,’ he says when Krennic looks up with a glare. 

‘This is fucking stupid.’ 

‘We will still move forward with the initial plan as discussed on Rettna. But we need at least two more people.’ 

Krennic sits back with a sigh, he motions to his beer and asks if Tarkin wants one. The Grand Moff inclines his head and Krennic goes out back for a minute, returning with one for Tarkin and another for himself. 

‘Where are your parents?’ Tarkin asks. 

‘Securing the pens.’ 

‘Excuse me?’ 

‘You never asked what they do for a living.’ 

Tarkin snorts, mutters that he probably shouldn’t know and Krennic says no, no probably not. 

‘Does it involve illegal distilling?’ 

‘It can.’ 

‘Does it involve illegal, exotic wildlife?’ 

‘Usually.’ 

‘I’m intrigued.’ 

‘Nial deals with problems. If you have a problem, Nial will solve it. Most people’s problems around here consist of animals being where they shouldn’t be. Like in your fresher.’ 

‘So he’s an exterminator?’ 

‘Hm, not quite. He usually...wrangles them. He likes animals more than he likes people.’ 

‘Sensible.’ 

‘Sometimes people buy pets that shouldn’t be pets, then they let them loose in the wild when they can’t control the animal anymore and it becomes a problem. Like all the snakes that aren’t native to anywhere on Lexrul. Nial is very concerned about the ecosystem.’ 

‘And you are what he got as a son?’ 

Krennic spreads his arms with a grin, ‘in all my magnificent glory.’ 

Tarkin rolls his eyes. He thinks that there are many words to describe Krennic but ‘magnificent glory’ are not any of them. Krennic’s grin is vicious and filled with amusement. It quickly disappears. 

‘This is a bit of a clusterfuck isn’t it?’ Krennic asks softly. 

‘I believe I have heard the term “gong show” employed in similar circumstances.’ 

‘It’s a hovercar wreck.’ 

‘With just as much rubbernecking,’ Tarkin rubs his eyes. ‘We will wrap this up and some normalcy will return.’ 

Krennic wears an expression of wanting to speak and Tarkin hopes that he won’t. The weight of the room, the tension, makes him think that Krennic is going to say something that shouldn’t be said, or can’t be unsaid once spoken. The man has a dirty habit of translating into existence things that should never be.  

There is nothing for them to speak about so why bother speaking at all? It gives weight to things that have no weight. Consequence when there is no consequence to give. 

When Krennic speaks it’s very quiet, ‘you know, we’re allowed to say it.’ 

‘Say what, Lieutenant-commander?’ 

‘That we can’t see the outcome. None of this is how it should be. The metaphorical rug ripped out. The frustrating part is, no action will ever be able to put it all back together how it was  _ before _ . You can’t go back to before. You can’t un-live and undo the effects of what has happened. This is a decided weakness of our species.’ 

Tarkin stands, takes up his beer, and says he’ll be upstairs. 

‘This is a very small house,’ Krennic snaps as Tarkin passes him. ‘I can come up stairs and harangue you there if you want.’ 

‘I really wish you wouldn’t.’ 

Krennic twists around to see him, ‘you know we’re either going to be absolutely fine or we’re going to die. So one way or another we’ll be all right, or we’ll be dead and won’t care. Though I still worry about my lack of a legacy. I do wish you’d stop stomping about.’ 

‘I do not stomp about.’ 

‘All day you have been. Was it what I said earlier? It’s what I said earlier, I can tell. You got all shirty and hid. If we were still on the Death Star you’d suddenly have 56 hours worth of meetings lined up magically in your calendar. I know all about those suddenly very urgent meetings, I’ve had a lot of them in my life too.’ 

‘I was working, unlike some people.’ 

Krennic lips twitch, a sliver of a fleeting smile. ‘Fine, you were working. I was working too, incidentally. We’re very good at working. Want to see the weird beasts Nial wrestles out of people’s kitchens and freshers?’ 

Tarkin contemplates the outcome of the possible answers before him. When Krennic spoke just now he had his Lexrul twang so said ‘wrastles’ instead of ‘wrestles’ which is something --- it’s something. Tarkin says, ‘fine.’ 

‘Excellent, but I must warn you, some of them are particularly ugly.’ 

‘You think all wildlife is ugly.’ 

‘Nature is disgusting and unhygienic. I appreciate it when reading about it, or watching holodocs, but not in person.’

 

/


	8. Chapter 8

The path out to the pens winds along through shallow, brackish water. They walk on wooden planks that form a continual, low, unreliable bridge. Krennic leads the way and occasionally points out vague directions to things that mean little to Tarkin.

‘Callen lives that way,’ Krennic points to his left. ‘And by that way I mean a four hour flight that way.’

‘Callen?’

‘Nial’s father.’

‘The husband of the woman who used to insult your mother?’

‘The same. Mel, Callen’s wife, was an interesting person.’

Tarkin thinks a good deal is said when someone is declared “interesting.” He would count Krennic “interesting,” which is not necessarily a compliment. In Krennic’s case it certainly isn’t.

Still, a good deal better than being bland. There is nothing worse than being bland. This is Tarkin’s confusion about Krennic’s friendship with Erso. Having met the man on a number of occasions Tarkin knows he was deeply intelligent. A brilliant scientist, _that_ is undeniable. But, at the same time, he never met a man who was so bright yet so, _so_ , indescribably boring.

Krennic, while being many things (infuriating, grating, arrogant, crude, frustrating, probably mad), is never boring.

  
  


Complex systems are unpredictable. This is a home truth Tarkin has wrestled with since the destruction of the Death Star. It is not a truth that he did not know before. As Krennic pointed out, they have had this discussion more than once. Only, he had hoped the mathematics of courage and firmness of decision would stop disintegration.

It is one thing to read about developing complexity in a paper, or have Krennic go on about fractals and butterflies, another thing to watch a carefully crafted, beautifully structured system collapse because of one thing.

The Alderaan butterfly flaps its wings ---

Faukman, a physicist who worked on the Tarkin Initiative, once wrote to him “deep in the chaotic regime, slight changes in structure almost always cause vast changes in behaviour. Complex, controllable behaviour seems precluded only in the _after_.”

What is happening here? Self-organization, in a manner of speaking. Systems of many components tend to reach a particular state, or a set of cycling states, or a small volume of their state space, with no external interference. This attractor behaviour is recognized at a different level of observation as the spontaneous formation of well-organized structures, patterns, or behaviours, from random initial conditions.

The process of self-organization is often interpreted as the evolution of order from random initial conditions. However, this evolution is limited to the specific attractor landscape of a given dynamical system. Unless its parameters are changed, no dynamical system can escape its own attractor landscape.

But at the edge of chaos resides the exact parameters necessary for life.

Ironic that this is what it takes to live.

Eriadu was that; but he had learned to render order from chaos. That was the fundamental lesson to learn. And what else? That the galaxy is full of secret haunts. Places where people go to hide and become hidden things. These lessons, like all things, start small.

Fact: All things start small. The way someone holds a cigarette, for instance.   

Fact: All things grow in unpredictable manners. The way the cigarette smoke trails up and there are eyes, for instance.

Fact: The unpredictability starts small, as well. The way nerves and muscles interact causing minute movements in the hand holding the cigarette which impacts the smoke trail which impacts how eyes are viewed, for instance.  

Tarkin returns his attention to Krennic.

‘We’ll see the crodiatas first. No one knows how old they can live to. There’s one Nial rescued before I was born and he estimates that it was already forty or fifty at the time, so it must be nearing one hundred.’

Crodiatas are large, reptilian creatures who lurk in water. With eyes held above the surface they stare a black-eyed stare. One lifts up its large head and Tarkin can see the long jaws, the teeth hanging over the edge of lips. It opens its mouth and lets out an eerie bellow. The sound matches what Tarkin had heard in their walk back from hiding the fighter jet. A prehistoric sound. It has an essence of not belonging.

‘The new one,’ Nial greets them walking along the plank to a platform beside the crodiatas’ pen. ‘She’s maybe a five footer. Had to get her out of someone’s yard the other week. Wiley beast.’

‘How large do they normally grow to be?’ Tarkin asks. He likes the strange creatures. They remind him of Eriadu.

‘Six foot’s normal. Some can get as long as ten, twelve. But that’s not common. Though there’s one out by the oil sands that’s a twelve footer and there’s nothing we can do about him. We’ve tried to relocate him, he likes to antagonize the workers, but it’s never worked. He always returns. I know others have tried to kill him but he seems immune to everything so far.’

‘Antagonize?’

‘He’s figured out humans are easy prey.’

‘And are they intelligent?’

‘Not particularly. Some animals are natural jail-breakers, but not these ones.’

‘How’s their speed?’

‘In the water, faster than you. Which is all that matters. On land, slower. Though they can get a good gallop going. Chased Orson up a tree once when he were a boy.’

Nial’s smile is bland at Orson’s exaggerated eye roll.

‘It was the tree or certain death by crody,’ Krennic complains. ‘I was stuck in it all night.’

Nial seems deeply unsympathetic. He nods to both of them and slips by to walk back to the house.

‘He’s an interesting man,’ Tarkin says once Nial is out of sight.

‘He’s very good at his job.’

‘And it was him you were inquiring with regarding the garbage chute issue on the Death Star?’

‘As I said, very good at his job.’ Krennic says as they approach another pen. This one with large, brightly coloured birds watching them. Esma is putting feed away in a small hutch and waves when she spies them.

‘I didn’t expect you out here. You see Nial?’

‘He’s gone in. I’m giving the Grand Moff a tour of the latest menagerie.’

‘Well, it’s a poor sight right now. We only have the regulars. There was a cappybunsa last week but he got eaten at some point in the night.’

‘Bad luck.’

Esma smoothes her tunic then gives a sharp nod, ‘if there’s anything you need.’

‘We’re fine Esma.’

‘All right.’ She looks between them then says, ‘I’ll be going in, then. Don’t stay out too late in the dark. We still don’t know what ate the cappybunsa.’

  
  


‘So, where are we getting back up?’ Krennic asks as they reach the end of the wooden path and turn around to head back. It is full night and difficult to see as the trees prevent moonlight from filtering down.

‘There’s a base here, I am sure we can borrow two men for forty-eight hours, fifty-six at most.’

‘You know who is in Sativran on shore leave? I found out while you were wandering around the wilderness trying to find yourself.’

Tarkin side eyes Krennic but it’s too dark for Krennic to notice. He happily continues on, ‘Lieutenant Adkin. We should bring her.’

‘We’re not bringing Lieutenant Adkin.’

‘Why not? She’s reliable, intelligent, and --’

‘On shore leave.’

They come up to the back porch then in to the main room where Esma and Nial are sitting in companionable silence.

Krennic hisses, ‘which is the point. She’s on shore leave. She won’t have constraints the way an active officer would, and it won’t be reported so the Emperor won’t find out we’re filtching manpower we haven’t been granted.’

Esma and Nial look at both of them.

‘Supper?’ Esma asks.

‘That would be lovely, thank you,’ Tarkin replies before Krennic can say anything.

  
  


That they have been on Lexrul for only one day astounds Krennic. It feels like a week. A month. A year. And everything becomes suddenly very knotted. Krennic moves food around on his plate as he tries to work through the complications but cannot find a string to unravel.

Trust Tarkin to fractal a situation. Krennic wants to punch him. And fuck him again.

He thinks their current situation entirely Tarkin’s fault. Tarkin and Alderaan and men with too many plants on their desk and Galen and that brat Galen bred with Lyra and complex systems and entropy and crickets.

Fuck all of this. He just wants to design beautiful, majestic buildings and bases and weapons that can immolate galaxies. What he has, instead, is a wild goose chase after obscure rebels and a moody Grand Moff. Where is his grandeur? He was supposed to achieve something like greatness. The decay of glory wasn’t supposed to happen until hundreds of years after his death. He is an architect first, and foremost, he knows there is no such thing as immortality.

But there is such a thing as grandeur, and leaving enough behind so that even if your name is forgotten, your language lost, there are at least some remains for people to look and think ‘whoever was here before us was _great_.’

He cannot accept that this has been ripped away from him.

  


Esma is speaking about Sativran and Tarkin is being a polite gentlemen so between the two of them the meal is carried off without too much awkwardness. Nial maintains his habitual quietude and Krennic is too busy thinking about fame, inertia and the heat death of the universe to pay attention.

Once finished, plates cleared and final conversations winding down, Tarkin excuses himself for the evening with polite thank yous to Esma and Nial. To Krennic he says, ‘we’ll talk in the morning.’

Krennic is then left with Nial and Esma. Maybe, he thinks, a cordy will break into the house and eat me. Stars, why is it I turn into a petulant teenager when I’m around them?

‘We haven’t had a chance to really talk,’ Esma says. She is setting out mugs for tea. Since he is likely going to die in the next week or so Krennic decides to be affable.

‘Been busy.’

‘Yes,’ she says dryly. ‘You’re always terribly busy.’

‘I don’t mean to be. I meant to schedule time off recently but then things went sort of...U-shaped.’

‘We heard about a big battle against the rebels,’ she says. ‘Didn’t we Nial? Near a planet, oh, what was its name?’

‘Scarif,’ Nial offers.

‘Yes, that was it.’

‘Heard the rebels did quite a bit of damage.’

Krennic glances at Nial, murmurs that he should be careful with the Grand Moff upstairs. He can most likely hear this entire conversation. ‘But yes, they were surprisingly well put together. It was...unexpected.’

‘You weren’t hurt?’ Esma asks.

Krennic smiles, ‘I am as you see me. Unharmed.’

Nial draws out a smoke and lights it, ‘you still making buildings?’

‘Sometimes.’

‘That seemed an odd thing to hire you for. What does the military need that for?’

‘Bases, storage, residences, repair sheds (which is a name that belies how large they are), hangers, space stations, all sorts of things. I do some urban work, which is what most people think of when they hear architect. Opera houses and senate buildings. Anyway, how business? How’s Callen? Still alive? Orthus still making dodgy rum?’

Nial ashes in his empty beer bottle saying that business is good. Nothing new on that front. Did get a good call the other month about a dianoga. ‘Made me think of your garbage chute problem. You get that sorted?’

‘In a manner of speaking.’

‘You have to get them out or else they breed. Hatchlings are very difficult to remove from a plumbing system.’

‘Don’t worry Nial, it’s not a problem anymore. How’s Callen?’

Esma firms her lips and removes herself from the room with now empty teapot.

‘He’s getting on,’ Nial sighs. ‘Can’t get out of bed, difficulty seeing, difficulty remembering. He keeps asking for Mel and doesn’t understand when told she’s dead.’

Krennic, not wishing to dwell on his dying namesake, moves on, ‘and Orthus?’

‘Still distilling.’

Rubbing circles into the wood Krennic wonders how to ask a favour. He leans back in the chair, left hand still drawing circles, he knows Nial is watching him with that quiet gaze of a father.

‘How good is your aim?’ Krennic asks at last.

‘Not bad.’

‘How willing are you to help a cause you’re not particularly fond of?’

Nial’s lip twitches, ‘you and the Grand Moff need help with something?’

‘Sort of.’ A glance towards the stairs and he drops his voice, outlines the basics, the barest necessities. Nial betrays not a thought as Krennic speaks.

‘You getting someone else?’

‘A colleague of ours from Sativran. She’s good.’

‘All right,’ Nial stands. ‘I’ll think about it.’

Krennic says his thanks and retreats to the couch for the evening. Lights are put out and he can hear the soft speech of Nial and Esma on the back porch. He knows they’ll be sharing a smoke and a beer and watching the silence of the forest, listening to the darkness of the fields out front.

Esma is whispering something to Nial, snatches of it escape inside through the screen door. She murmurs something that could be a poem, an incantation, a prayer: You do not have to be good, you do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves. The world offers itself to your imagination, calls to you like the wild, announcing your place in the family of things.

 

/


	9. Chapter 9

Tarkin wakes. It is night with wide swaths of moonlight cutting across the bed and floor boards. From down the hall are the snores of Nial and Esma. It is difficult when your body is so habituated to space when you're is stuck planet-side. With the exception of Coruscant. On Coruscant, at least, he could go out into the night or while away time in his office. 

Here on Lexrul with its wilderness and nature-structured patterns people sleep. And if you cannot sleep you lie useless trying to sleep. 

Eriadu was much the same. When night fell, you slept. Sun up, you wake. If you rolled over and it was light enough, even if only the dismal grey of very early morning, you got up. In space timelessness takes over. You work according to military clocks and your access to sunlight is through lamps or vitamin supplements. Once accustomed to that dark coldness of metallic vacuums it is difficult to realign to nature. 

Again, Coruscant raises its head as the exception. No one on that planet functions according to a mere natural clock. The city-planet Krennic designed after the Clone Wars is all metal, permacrete and glass. There is little green, even at the top level. Tarkin knows how those below live and it is a miserable thing. 

The thing with lying awake useless trying to sleep is that the mind runs circles. Tarkin moves on from Coruscant's enabling of space-time sleep habits to rebels as they are a more important topic. If he is going to be restlessly awake he might as well make use of the time. Rolling over he drags his trousers over to the bed and fishes around in the back pocket for the dead guard's pendant. 

On his back again he holds it up to inspect by moonlight. Copper or brass and rough in appearance. While not unpleasant, it was clearly not made by a skilled jeweler. He turns it over, rubs thumb against the metal. It reminds him of something but he can’t put his finger on it. It’s something Krennic once said and, because he is annoyed with Krennic at the moment, he is determined to remember whatever it is without asking. 

Krennic is a problem. The Lieutenant-commander has always been a problem. A problem that has grown exponentially since this assignment began. It’s the multi-layered conversations, the way Krennic says one thing but means one hundred things. For a man who is such an engineer when all is said and done, he speaks with a shocking lack of literality. That said,  engineers are builders and Krennic builds his meanings up. He says one thing, a foundation, then builds up meaning from there with all those words that are between what has been spoken. 

The Lexrulian rebels on Rettna are extremists so therefore what the Emperor was concerned about. In his own way, Krennic too is an extremist. It must be a Lexrul thing. At least Krennic is only an extremist about his work  rather than any sort of belief system. Tarkin considers that to be one of the man's good points. Krennic believes in absolutely nothing beyond himself and his work. Even the Empire is secondary which Tarkin can abide precisely  _ because  _ Krennic believes in nothing but himself and his work. Krennic knows which hand feeds him. Or funds him, as the case may be. 

Rolling over he takes up one of Krennic’s flimsy notebooks that he carries around when planetside. He flips through finding sketches of buildings they’ve seen, buildings they haven’t seen. Some he thinks must be made up. There’s mathwork down the side of one page for the velocity of different wing angles. Scribbles of weaponry ideas, new base designs half completed, different approaches to space-based landing pads. The notebook is deposited back to the floor.

What are the rebels communicating with their ritual? What does this metal pendant signify?

Remaining in bed becomes intolerable so Tarkin pulls his trousers and shirt on and goes downstairs as quietly as can be managed with wooden floors. No wonder Krennic adores permacrete and stone. Everything silent. Sanitized. You can breath. You can hear yourself think. 

Krennic is asleep on the couch with feet hanging off the edge. Tarkin opens the back door and deposits himself on the bench. 

Part of the genius of politics is manipulating modes of communication. Tarkin personally breaks all communication into two categories: transmission and ritual. 

A transmission view of communications refers to something that imparts information between people such as holomedia. A ritual view of communications, on the other hand, reaffirms common societal values and beliefs such as ceremonies.

What the rebels were doing is ritual communication. Both literally, they were doing a ritual, and in the broader figurative whole of reaffirming whatever shared belief exists between them all. 

Controlling both ritual and transmission based communications is necessary for maintaining peace in the Empire.  Slippage happens when one subsumes the other. Or both fracture. Or find themselves undermined. Society, whether it be at a planetary level or galactic level, exists not only by communication, but it may fairly be said to exist  _ i _ _ n  _ communication.

The Imperial communications branch they speak of “getting ahead of the story” or “controlling the narrative” or “adjusting the optics” which directly translates to photo op’s, well timed interviews, strategically implemented highlight stories, and beautifully crafted images. 

For how pedestrian most communications personnel are, Tarkin appreciates the importance of their role within the Imperial machine. 

He fears that the Empire is losing the plot, at the moment. 

Beside him on a small ledge next to a bottle opener is a pack of smokes so he avails himself of one.

‘Nial will kill you if you smoke the whole pack,’ Krennic announces from the door. He stands in shadows with a thin sheet on his shoulders. It’s an absurdly imperial image. 

‘I’m having merely one but I’ll happily buy another pack if necessary.’ 

‘One’s fine. I’ll have one too. And it’s only because this brand is hard to get out here.’ 

They share a light. Contemplate that wholesome darkness of the land. What a contrast, those fields, then the forest, this swampy space between the two. 

‘Have you seen this before?’ Tarkin takes out the pendant and hands it over. Krennic holds it up and squints. A minute then a small thieves lamp is lit and his face illuminated ghostly orange. 

‘It looks familiar.’ He blows out smoke. ‘Desert sun with mankind on top.’ A cheeky grin. To explain he adds, ‘the Fiorites. I’ve told you about them before. Loonies in the desert here on Lexrul. We can go and try and find some if you want. They generally don’t talk to outsiders.’ He hands the pendant back. 

‘Do you think they might be related to our rebels on Rettna?’ 

‘No,’ Krennic snorts. ‘The Fiorites are  _ aesthetes _ ,’ he affects a posh core-world accent for the word. ‘They hide away in the wilderness thinking the galaxy is going to end any day now.’

‘Ah yes, I recall. You were explaining polygons.’ 

‘Was I?’ 

‘Yes.’ 

It dawns on Tarkin: the Emperor’s questions about polygons. His concern about extremists. He can tell Krennic hasn’t followed his route of thinking and why would he? He wasn’t present when the Emperor quizzed the Grand Moff about architecture. Tarkin doesn't want to admit to either the Emperor or Krennic (especially not Krennic) that he scraped by in his answer with acceptable levels of information because of Krennic. It’s a shameful thing to say to a man he believes himself superior to. Though, that nausea inducing back part of his mind always adds, _but but but._

He always tells himself that every incident supplied by those _buts_ is an exception. 

‘These Fiorites,’ Tarkin continues in a casual manner. ‘They’re the ones who believe in three ages of the universe, or something to that affect?'  

‘Three endings to the universe, or galaxy, I was never clear which they were aiming for. We’re in the third and final, so they say.’ Krennic grins at Tarkin, ‘getting spooked by our desert friends?’ 

‘Not in the slightest. What did they have to do with polygons again?’ 

‘Their temples were polygonal. Are polygonal, I suppose. They’re still around so present tense etc.’ 

Tarkin finishes his smoke in contemplation of this information. What if, on an off chance, the rebels they were seeing on Rettna were these Fiorites? There's a tension between the fact that Fiorites are evidently adverse to outside contact and the fact that the dead guard was wearing a pendant associated with their sect. Then there's the further fact that the rebels speak a Lexrulian dialect. Yet, despite all of this information Krennic seems so sure they're not Fiorites. 

But - Three ages of death. Three layers of the organization. It's a leap but Tarkin thinks there could be something there, specially since the Rettna rebels are so symbol focused. If only they had had proper time with the guard they could have gotten more information. But they  _ are _ Lexrulians, that is indisputable fact. Lexrulians speaking a dying dialect on a mostly abandoned planet with ancient technology coupled with some not-so ancient technology. 

‘Your Fiorites--’

‘Not  _ my  _ Fiorites.’ 

Tarkin waves a hand, ‘your Fiorites, are they technologically advanced? Or are they hoping to providence that their timeline works out with regards to the galactic destruction that’s due?’ 

‘Hoping to providence.’ 

Tarkin stands, rubs his chin in thought as he paces to the front of the porch to look out to darkened water and ancient hovercraft moored nearby. Things add up until they don’t. If only they had more information. Perhaps another recon trip is in order? At the same time, he feels they should have backup. 

There stands the Lieutenant-commander’s suggestion of Lieutenant Adkin home on shore-leave. And who else? No octogenarians. Well, three is still an improvement over two. And it will realign the proper order between everyone. Remind Krennic exactly how low on the ladder he is, now, after his failures. 

Tarkin ends his introspection. It is late and they had best get a good night’s sleep, or what is left of it. 

‘We'll gather more supplies tomorrow,’ Tarkin says turning around and brushing past Krennic as he returns indoors. ‘And we will also need to secure a second fighterjet.’ 

Krennic's wicked expression flashes quickly then disappears itself. He follows after Tarkin, stopping him before he goes upstairs. 

‘Why all the questions about Fiorites?’ He whispers. They’re standing close so as to hear each other. Tarkin’s head is bowed, Krennic’s chin tilted up. 

‘I was just remembering what you said about your planet. I appreciate having as much information about a location as I can.’ 

‘So you ask about them but not the local governance structure.’ 

‘I already know about the local governance structure.’

Krennic rolls his eyes, pulls back away from Tarkin creating empty space. He retires back to the couch. A lazy hand raises up and Krennic says a muffled, ‘good night.’ 

  
  


Morning the weather continues sunny. Coming downstairs there is already food on the counter and Krennic sulking over caf. 

‘What hour do your parents wake?’ 

Krennic shrugs, ‘I don’t think they sleep, actually. Nial’s usually up and about at all hours.’ 

‘I think it’s time we move forward with our plan,’ Tarkin says. ‘We’ve wasted too much time as it is.’ 

‘Barely three days.’ 

‘Too much time, Lieutenant-commander. Yet another reason--’ 

‘Why I’m inept as a Director, et cetera et cetera, so on and so forth. Find a new insult, governor, you’re running thin on that one.’ 

‘Indeed, but that wasn't going to be my point. It is yet another reason we are returning as soon as possible to Rettna. But, we need support.’ 

Krennic perks up from his caf and waits, alert, for more details. 

‘I have a list of possibilities,’ Tarkin continues as he takes a seat.

‘Lieutenant Adkin is the only one who makes sense.’ 

‘We will consider all four of the options before making our choice.’ 

‘But we’re going with her. This is just a formality, right?’ 

Tarkin pulls up the list and briefing notes on each candidate. He flips two of the files to Krennic’s tablet and explains they will go by the traditional rubric used for deciding eligibility of a candidate. Krennic mutters under his breath about Tarkin being idiotic and  _ speaking of wasting time _ . 

  
  


Nial returns from whatever it was he was doing before Esma. He enters with quiet deflation and lowers himself, without a word, into his favoured chair in the sitting area. He then, with great care, pulls out a small piece of wood and a knife. 

Tarkin looks over. The man whittles. Krennic looks up then twists around to see what Tarkin is staring at. He grimaces, appears to flush, and loads up more files which obscure his face in layers of blue. Tarkin turns his attention from the father to the son. 

Krennic is furiously filling in the rubric and repeats, as he does so, that he maintains it should be Lieutenant Adkin. Tarkin cooly replies that this is protocol. 

A quiet hum from Nial, ‘protocol serves a purpose.’ 

Tarkin cocks an eyebrow at a morose Krennic. 

‘Until it doesn’t anymore,’ Nial adds.

Krennic smiles cruelly. He mouths, ‘ha.’ 

‘Still, good to know where you stand on matters and how you got there,’ Nial continues. ‘If you don’t know how you got somewhere then you don’t know who you are, I think.’ 

  
  


It does, in the end, come down to Lieutenant Adkin. A triumphant Krennic eagerly hunts down her contact information so they can pick her up. As she isn’t too far from Sativran he suggests they can get her on the way out. This would also prevent Esma from requesting them to “make a quick pit stop for a few odds and ends” while there.

‘We should speak with her now rather than later, since we’re going back soon,’ Krennic says. They upstairs in his old room, again close, again so they can hear each other as they whisper. Krennic does not think about their closeness. 

The door is shut but that means little with thin walls and floors. 

‘I agree,’ Tarkin says. 

‘When are we heading out?’ 

‘Day after tomorrow, early morning. We are still short one person as four is ideal, and we need a few more supplies, a second ship as well. I also need to wrap some things up with the Emperor.’ 

Krennic squints at him. A twitched smirk from Tarkin as he leans in further, lips brushing against Krennic’s ear, ‘that is all, Lieutenant-commander. Unless you have something to add?’ 

Krennic swallows, glares, and stomps out of the room with a flourish.

 

Later, as Tarkin sits out on the back porch writing a detailed report to the Emperor on his thoughts from the previous night about the rebels, he can hear the unmistakable sound of Lieutenant Adkin via comms set saying, ‘Oh no, not you two.’

 

/


End file.
